Expect the Unexpected
by Sevandor1
Summary: On the day of Titan/Tighten's defeat, Roxanne Ritchi begins to learn that "predictable" isn't always what you expect.
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: This is original fan work, intended solely for the entertainment of the readers, and in no way intends any infringement on any copyrights, trademarks, or licenses held by Dreamworks Animation SKG, Alan Schoolcroft, Brent Simons, or the holders of any other legal rights or licenses pertaining to Megamind.

* * *

_If you do not expect the unexpected you will not find it._

_Heraclitus_

I

Over the years in which she had covered the rivalry between Metro Man and Megamind, Roxanne Ritchi had used many words to describe the self-styled supervillian: egocentric, childish, flamboyant, obnoxious, strange, quirky, manic, stubborn, persistent, melodramatic, self-centered, yes, even insane and evil. After Metro Man had apparently died, she'd added "monster" and "heartless" to the list, but events of the past few days had ultimately caused her to rescind those last two, and to revise her opinions of some of the others. Indeed, after the shocking discovery that Metro Man had deliberately faked his own death so that he could end the superhero "gig" and go off to pursue other interests, she'd shifted a few of those descriptions to _him, _tacking on "thick-headed jerk" for good measure.

As to his former nemesis, now turned hero after today's defeat of Titan (_she _knew how to spell the would-be hero's name, even if that idiot Hal didn't), she was starting to revise the list. She had dropped some of her descriptions for Megamind as no longer valid, kept a few as still applicable (if less irritating than they once had seemed), and was finding some new ones she wouldn't have thought possible before she had had a chance to know something of the real Megamind, behind the disguise of Bernard. Sweet, funny, charming, sympathetic — they were descriptions of the kind of man Roxanne had always wanted in her life, but never had she thought such a person would come with blue skin and a giant head.

Yes, there were many words Roxanne could and had used to describe the qualities of Megamind, both the hapless villain of the past and the slowly emerging hero of the present. But never, not once, not even in her wildest dreams had she imagined that the leather and spike wearing alien with the dramatic habits of a rock star could be said to possess what was generally called good taste.

Really, the whole punk-Goth sort of display that had been Megamind's trademark for the past twenty years usually implied the opposite, and deliberately so. It was part and parcel of rebellion, and if Megamind's entire criminal career hadn't been a conscious act of rebellion against a world that had rejected him, she had learned nothing of people and what made them tick during all her years as a reporter. Megamind may have been an alien, but underneath the leather and spikes and blue skin and hyperdramatic bravura, he was as human at heart as anyone born on Earth. And while Roxanne would readily admit that he had a certain kind of _style, _she would never have imagined that he also had _class. _ She found out otherwise on the day he defeated Titan, in a way that left her honestly flabbergasted.

It began after the impromptu celebration in the street. There had been the inevitable reports and statements to give to the authorities, something Megamind had never done before, not outside of prison, but he handled the situation with shocking honesty, as well as considerable discomfort. He made no effort to hide the fact that he had been responsible for Titan's existence, but he also provided considerable detail as to his training, which Hal himself had corroborated. The flaw in the plan hadn't really been Megamind's; he had tried to give back to the city the protector he believed he had taken from it. The flaw had been in Hal himself, a basic lack of redeeming character. One couldn't even blame Megamind for choosing him, since Roxanne admitted that she had been responsible for the accident that had imbued the creepy cameraman with superpowers. Up until the moment she said it, she hadn't been willing to admit it to herself, and she was still processing all the feelings that came rushing in as a result.

In the end, the police decided that this was too knotty a situation to figure out in one day. When Megamind promised all the help he could give to rebuild the city, even better than before, the authorities were willing to forgive a lot; that he sent his brainbots to start implementing the repairs immediately improved their attitude toward him even more. That he did all this before allowing himself to be taken to a hospital when he was about to fall on his face from exhaustion and the abuse he'd suffered pretty much settled the matter, as far as the powers that be were concerned. If Megamind wanted the job of defending the city, they were willing to give him a chance.

When they were both taken to Metro Hospital to have their various scrapes, bumps, bruises, and sprains taken care of (the brainbots had long since taken Minion back to the Lair so that he could get into a new habitat, and a spare robotic body), Roxanne had been startled to realize that for all that he'd been far more seriously manhandled by "Tighten," the blue alien wasn't much more badly hurt than she herself. As they left the hospital together, she was frankly astonished that Megamind hadn't been admitted for much more severe damage, and she told him so, but he had answered with a smile that was both mischievous and pleased.

"What, are you telling me that after years of reporting all my battles with Metro Man, this is the first time you stopped to wonder how I managed to survive in one piece?"

Roxanne was embarrassed, partly because he had a point, and partly because despite his smile, she saw in his vivid green eyes a not quite successfully hidden flash of hurt, the belief that she had never thought about what happened to him because she didn't care. "I..." she began, not quite knowing what to say. She didn't want to come right out and admit that once he was hauled off by Metro Man, she never gave him another thought, because that wasn't entirely true. In fact, reflecting on the past made her realize that she had always been glad that he seemed to be pretty much okay at the end of those battles, but she had never stopped to wonder why she'd felt that way.

In retrospect, she now saw that maybe all along, she had known that there wasn't a truly _evil _bone in Megamind's lanky body, nor even in his oversized head. He put on the show and played the game as the villain, but from the very first time he'd kidnapped her, he had always said right out that it was just that: a game. Until Metro Man had faked his death, all his efforts at villainy had been aimed squarely at his nemesis. He had tried to _scare_ Roxanne, certainly, had threatened her with bodily harm, but after the first kidnapping, it had been plain to her that underneath all the poses and posturing and attempts to be menacing, Megamind was just trying to make _someone _notice him, notice his efforts, notice that he could do amazing things, notice that he wanted to be accepted for being _something._ If being bad was all he could get, he would take it, but really, he'd never been all that good at it because at the end of the day, it wasn't who he really was under all the spikes and leather and melodrama.

Roxanne had known this for a long time, though she hadn't let herself admit it, because she'd wanted to be angry at him for all the years of kidnapping her and making her a part of the Game without her permission. She hadn't thought about whether or not he was hurt in the battles because a part of her — a shamefully petty part, she had to acknowledge — had wanted a little payback, and believed that he deserved whatever pain he got because he was stupid enough to ask for it over and over again.

But today, the Game had changed, and the world she'd thought she known so well had been turned on its head. Metro Man had showed a side of himself that had shocked her to her core: he had revealed that he could be even more self-centered and uncaring than Megamind at his very worst. He had dumped not just her but an entire city. He had shrugged them off as no longer his concern, perpetrated an awful hoax against them because he was _bored. _Oh, sure, his reasoning was that he had done his time, paid his dues — but if the people of Metro City had come to rely on him, whose fault was that? Who had ever _asked _Wayne Scott to set himself up as their defender, their hero, their righter of wrongs? They did now, but _he _had been the one to start that ball rolling, and just because he hadn't had the guts to tell mommy and daddy, "No, I don't wanna be a hero" didn't mean the people were to blame because he'd taught them to depend on him. Hell, from what she knew of the whole story, if Wayne hadn't started manipulating people into worshipping him as a child, Megamind the villain would never have come to be.

And yet, there was Megamind, giving his no-holds-barred all to the role that Roxanne was now seeing had been thrust on him, while Wayne wasn't even breaking a sweat carrying out the one he had chosen — even demanded — for himself. He claimed now that it hadn't been his choice, that he'd done what had been expected of him, but he hadn't even _tried_ to be honest with the city, or with her. He'd never thought that maybe he could've just said something about his growing desire to retire, and the whole charade of him "dying" wouldn't have been needed. By cutting them out of his thoughts and plans, he insulted everyone who had once looked up to him, and he dumped the blame for his actions onto someone who for once did not deserve it.

There were so many implications to all of this — not the least of which was the mind-blowing realization that when the city _really _needed a superhero, to fight a _truly_ dangerous criminal, it had been the supposed villain who had stepped into those empty shoes, and won — that Roxanne found her head spinning, trying to take it all in. She couldn't manage that Herculean task right now, but she promised herself she would, and soon. For the moment, she focused on the question at hand.

"I'm sorry," she said, and meant it. "I guess I never really did before. I always figured that if you'd been hurt, Metro Man would've taken you to a hospital, not to prison."

She really couldn't blame Megamind for the bitterness in voice. "He never cared that much, not about me. He told me, early on. _If evil dares to show its ugly face where it isn't wanted, it will always get smashed by the fists of justice. Whenever evil gets hurt, it's paying its debt to society." _His imitation of the former hero was surprisingly dead-on, right down to his facial expression and cheesy pose. It disappeared with a shrug that didn't quite hide a bit of an aching shoulder. "After hearing that, I figured I'd need to look out for myself, if I wanted to stay in one piece."

The reporter was appalled. "Wait, he actually _said _that?"

"When we were still kids," Megamind confirmed. "He was working on his hero banter, but I knew he meant it. He gave me three cracked ribs and a dislocated jaw, and that was just from playing dodgeball. Fortunately, I'm tougher than I look and I heal pretty quickly, but after that, I started working on ways to protect myself from his kind of powers."

He grinned, an impish, innocently gleeful grin of a boy who has found a flawless way to raid the cookie jar and never get caught. A look of harmless, playful mischief, not malicious, deceitful evil. "Would you like to see some of it — someday, of course, not right now?" The way he added that last part, he was acutely aware that he might've said something she would take badly, and was dreadfully embarrassed, and more dreadfully desperate that she not take offense.

Understanding, she smiled at him in a way that let him know he had nothing to worry about. "I _would _like that, thanks. And for the record, I... I didn't mean to say I never cared about what happened to you, I just...never really thought about it. Most people wouldn't after they'd been kidnapped, y'know?"

This time, he blushed, quite thoroughly, and the simple... _humanness _of it touched her. Really, the more she was allowed to see the unguarded side of Megamind, the person rather than the persona, she was convinced that what she had known of him as Bernard the geek was real, and the Master of All Villainy the facade. "Yes...well..." he stammered, scratching the back of his head as he searched for the right words. He finally let loose a huge sigh. "There are some things I _really_ need to explain to you, if you're willing to listen." He said it in a quiet voice, completely free of any attempts at manipulation.

Roxanne nodded, recognizing that in making the offer in such a way, he was allowing himself to be made vulnerable to her, to be accepted or rejected as she saw fit. "I'm willing," she said simply, not wanting to increase his obvious discomfort over what she knew was a difficult situation, for both of them. It was a good moment, a step toward possible reconciliation — so of course it had to be ruined by an inappropriately loud growl from her stomach. It was her turn to look sheepish, especially when Megamind reacted with an expression of complete disbelief that such a rude noise could come from _her. _"And I'm dying of hunger," she added with an embarrassed laugh. "Maybe we can find some quiet restaurant for that talk..."

But the ex-villain shook his head, regretfully rather than dismissively. "I don't think there's one quiet enough in the entire city, right now. Not for me. And I don't want any more disguises between us. I...can't say what I need to say like that. Not anymore."

Roxanne couldn't have doubted his sincerity even at her angriest, and she was finding that with each passing minute, her anger with him was dissolving. Really, if he had had any feelings at all for her — and in reflecting over their bizarre history together, she was positive he had for quite a long time, but had either been in denial or was so truly naive that he hadn't known what those feelings _were _— what other choice would he have had but to approach her through a disguise? She suddenly felt a wave of weirdness ripple through her brain, an odd sensation that she was the Roxanne to this most unlikely Cyrano. "I guess I can understand that," she admitted, fighting to keep her mind focused in the moment. "There's my place, though I'm not sure I have anything edible in my refrigerator — been a busy week, after all..."

Her voice trailed off as she saw the blue alien wince and shudder. "No, not there, not for this. It needs to be someplace where...where I wasn't 'Bernard.'"

Given what she was now sure he wanted to explain, she could understand that, too. "Well, that kills the whole 'my place or yours' idea, then. There was that little...ah...escapade with me and 'Bernard' back at your Lair."

"Yes," he agreed, though his eyes became distant for a moment, as if making a decision. They refocused suddenly when he made up his mind. "I agree, the Lair you know isn't the right place, for a lot of reasons. But you've only seen the 'business' end of things, haven't you?"

She blinked, puzzled. "Things?" she echoed.

He smiled faintly. "My... home. I've never called it that before, you know. The prison was always home, because that's where I grew up, where I kept returning. Sort of how for other people, home is where they were born and experienced childhood, even after they move away. But when I was free... I didn't live my entire life on the outside in the labs and storage areas of that warehouse. I made part of the building my home, a part you never saw. I never let you see it."

"Why not?" she couldn't help but ask.

"Because it was none of your business," he began, completely out of defensive reflex, then so suddenly changed to a more honest direction, Roxanne felt the whiplash. "And a little bit out of fear, I guess, protecting the image. Supervillains aren't supposed to need things like that — or if they do, they have huge mansions and castles to show off their superiority." He snorted. "Funny that this time, it was the hero who had all that. If you're willing, we could go there. Minion's really a fantastic cook — it's amazing what he can whip up on five minutes' notice, as long as you don't want fish. Seafood is off the menu at the Lair, except for crab and lobster. Minion can't stand those snappy-clawed bullies, and he takes a sense of righteous vengeance in cooking them. He even indulges in a bite or two, from time to time, and he actually loves shrimp, so long as someone else cleans and precooks them. He'll be here for me soon, anyway, and I think he'd love a chance to show off for you."

Roxanne got the distinct impression that Minion wasn't the only one who wanted a chance to show her a side of himself that could be thought of as "normal." She made a show of thinking it over, then smiled. "Okay, why not? I have to admit, I always wondered if you really did all your living in a glorified hangar. I kinda pictured you sleeping in that big chair of yours and eating nothing but takeout pizza and fast food."

He rolled his eyes in exasperation even as he laughed — not a melodramatically evil laugh, nor a taunting laugh, but a normal, everyday, _human _laugh that was actually quite nice to hear. "Falling back on a stereotype, Ms Ritchi? And here I thought you despised being _predictable."_

Roxanne laughed. "Okay, okay, you got me there! You're right, I don't really know much of anything about your private life, and I have to admit, 'Bernard' didn't have bad taste in restaurants." When his smile dimmed at her utterance of the B word, she quickly steered away from it. "Can we stop by my apartment on the way? I don't remember the last time I had a chance to clean up, and these clothes are getting pretty ripe."

Her diversion was successful, and Megamind readily agreed as Minion pulled up with the quickly repaired car. It looked at little strange, seeing an invisible door partially held on with all too visible duct tape. "The brainbots did the best they could, sir," the fish explained as they climbed in, the ex-villain graciously offering Roxanne the shotgun seat in front. "I think they're just a bit overwhelmed, with so many new orders to carry out. Maybe you can calm them down when they all get home."

Megamind grimaced, but not very seriously. "I think they're all overdue for maintenance — and a few changes of parameter, since we've changed _our _parameters. Oh, well, a minor inconvenience. First things first. Ms Ritchi's hungry, and as the doctors did suggest rest after today's traumatic events, the stress of being among people in a restaurant would be out of the question."

"Oh, I agree, sir," Minion said cheerfully. "I was thinking of making Phat Thai tonight, if we managed to get back in one piece. It's quick, and I know just where to get the best fresh noodles and chicken..."

"As long as it's not too far out of the way. We need to stop at Ms Ritchi's apartment first, so she can freshen up."

"No problem, sir! It's right on the way!"

As they headed off, Roxanne looked back at Megamind and mouthed, _Is he always this chipper after a fight?_ The blue genius rolled his eyes and answered, _Always. _Minion was happily oblivious to their exchange, humming softly as he drove to the requested destination.

Unfortunately, all was not well when Roxanne reached her apartment. The place was a disaster, literally. From the kinds of damage inflicted on every room, it was clear that Hal had come looking for her while she and Megamind had gone to pay a visit to Metro Man's hideout. It was also clear that he had been angry to find her gone, and had taken out his frustrations in ruining the place with his new powers. Appalled, she alerted the police to the matter and asked that they come by when they could to make their investigations and reports. She also informed her insurance agent, then went to her bedroom, found a valise that was still in one piece, along with a small selection of clothes, the few that had been undamaged. She grabbed what toiletries she could find intact, along with a more sensible pair of shoes than her fuzzy pink slippers. There was no way she'd be able to clean up here, as the water lines were apparently broken, but she figured she could manage to survive the evening unshowered until she was able to check into a hotel.

Megamind noticed that something was up the moment she returned, unchanged and unwashed, bag in hand. "Hal trashed my place while we were out visiting Wayne," she told him, not quite expecting the scowl of disapproval that darkened his face. "I've contacted the authorities and my insurance, but I'll have to check into a hotel until my place is livable again. I just wish I could've grabbed a quick shower. After seeing what he did up there, I want to get rid of Hal's stink more than ever."

"That, I can provide," the newly minted hero promised. "As I told you, not all of the Lair is devoted to 'business.' I think you'll find the bathing facilities adequate."

She hadn't realized she'd been hoping he'd say that, but she was grateful. "Thanks," she said with a smile. "I really appreciate it."

When they finally reached the no longer evil Lair and she was escorted to the hitherto unseen living areas, she appreciated it more than she could have anticipated. The living space was on the top floor, below the roof with its fake observatory, and above the lab and garage and storage levels. When they stepped off the elevator and the lights came on automatically, her jaw hit the floor.

There was no way she could call this place evil, or a lair. It was shockingly... _beautiful._

The room they entered upon leaving the elevator was large and high-ceilinged, like all the rooms in the building, but when the lights came up, it was warm and inviting, not creepy with shadows. From the furnishings and their arrangement, it was meant to be a sort of living room and rec room combined — but not at all as Roxanne had expected. Its design and decor was in the style called Prairie School, that which was favored and developed by architects like Frank Lloyd Wright. The clean lines, natural colors, and soft lighting was utterly unlike anything Roxanne had imagined she would see. The flat panel TV cleverly built into the furnishings so that it seemed an intended part of the style, _that_ was no surprise, but from the polished parquet floor to the tall, narrow windows of tinted Wright inspired glass, all the rest was nothing less than a shock.

For well more than a minute, Roxanne could only stand there, gaping, staring, taking it all in. Finally, her eyes screamed their need to blink, and that finally broke her trance. "It — it...it's beautiful!" she said in a soft voice that was plainly awe-struck.

Megamind grinned, delighted by her reaction. "It is, isn't it?" he said, pleased to have surprised her but otherwise not at all gloating. "There were architecture books and magazines in the prison library, and I devoured them all when I was still a kid — trying to learn everything I could to plan effective demolitions, of course," he hastily explained, as one would to cover up a guilty pleasure. "There are some styles I don't care for, but I found almost all of them fascinating, for one reason or another. Every room up here uses a different style, 'cause I couldn't settle on just one. The main bathroom is Art Nouveau, my larger bedroom is mostly Art Deco with some late Victorian touches, the other is Japanese Muromachi period, the kitchen is Brooks Stevens — excepting the modern appliances, of course. The library is futurist reinterpreted neo-Byzantine, Minion's rooms are various kinds of organic architectural styles, though he wanted some Florida Modern in there, you've seen the neo-Gothic parts of the working Lair, and then there's—"

The reporter's brain nearly exploded with information overload. "Whoa, whoa, I just got here, let's take this one step at a time! I mean, it's absolutely gorgeous, but..."

"But...?" she was prompted after a minute of silence had passed.

She flushed bright red. "I don't know how to say this without having you take it the wrong way, but..."

To her surprise, Megamind understood what she was trying to find a diplomatic way to avoid saying outright. "You're wondering if all of this is ill-gotten gains. A fair question, I suppose. The answer is no. I may have been many things that were bad, but I gave up thievery when I was still a teenager. Petty crimes are for petty people."

"You didn't seem to consider it petty when you looted all the banks and museums."

She regretted her words when she saw the sincere remorse dim his face. "That was a mistake. I think I knew it from the start, but I went a little crazy after it seemed that I'd finally managed to succeed at _something, _something important. I'm not blaming you, but until you came up and demanded to know what I planned to do to the city that night outside City Hall, I hadn't really given it much thought. Beating Metro Man _just once_ had been the whole point of my criminal career, and... well, you know as well as I do that _destroying_ him should have been impossible! With him gone, I didn't know what to do but play it out, doing what people expected of me in the villain role. Oh, it felt fun at first, because I was still high on the thought that I'd actually, _finally _won after twenty years of losing, that I could have or do anything I wanted. To someone who grew up in a prison, it was intoxicating, I admit it! But it didn't take long before I started to feel that it wasn't very satisfying — who am I kidding? It wasn't satisfying at all. When I saw it would make you happy, I gave everything back, and it felt a _lot _better. Not just because it pleased you, but because it felt... right."

That actually made sense to her. She smiled softly at the ease of his admission. "So all of this here came from legitimate sources?"

He nodded. "When I was still a kid, after I was expelled from _shool,_ the warden and the head of the prison's education department got me involved with correspondence courses to try to continue my education, to keep me occupied and out of trouble. The prison only taught basic stuff I'd learned before I was two, so that was the only way to go. When they found I had a knack for anything dealing with science or math, even art, they let me start specializing in engineering and physics and drafting. I came up with designs for a number of things that are now in common use in virtually anything that uses computer electronics." He snorted. "And people wonder how the 'computer revolution' took off so quickly! The warden had them patented for me and had my earnings put in trust, hoping that if I saw how my gifts could be used in a positive and profitable way, I'd give up the whole idea of being the baddest boy of all."

He paused, shaking his head at the memory. "I think if I hadn't had that personal vendetta with Wayne Scott — and if he hadn't started going public with his Metro Boy schtick when we were both twelve — it might've worked. By the time I turned sixteen, the trust fund with the earnings from my patents was worth almost as much as the fortune he eventually inherited from his parents, and I kept coming up with new improvements and new items, so the fund kept growing. In that, I knew I was better than him, because I _earned _my resources, even if they were frozen from time to time, and I had occasional... setbacks from paying out reparations. So if I ever stole anything, it was usually to prove some kind of point. But for the most part, it always felt petty. Demeaning."

He stopped to shake his head again, this time to clear away the cobwebs of painful memories. He smiled, perhaps a little too easily. "Well, enough about me! You said you wanted to clean up, not listen to my ramblings. The washroom is this way."

The alien led her across the large room, headed for a particular corridor. As they went, Roxanne tried to take in as much of her unlikely surroundings as she could, while Megamind called to an adjoining room, "Minion, are there still any brainbots around to help Ms Ritchi?" Roxanne knew that the little robots were a weird combination of servant and pet around the Lair, and while most of them were harmless, there were a few with a nasty tendency to bite the hand that fed them, so to speak.

"Just Pinky and the Brain, sir," the fish called back from wherever he was, probably the kitchen. "The others are out starting the city clean up, or are down for repair."

Roxanne shot her host a peculiar look. "Pinky and the Brain?"

"Two latter generation prototypes," Megamind said, a bit defensively. "You've seen Pinky, I'm sure."

She nodded. "The pink one, yes. But the Brain?"

"I was aiming for a version with a higher degree of independent reasoning. Unfortunately, this particular prototype got stuck in a flawed logic loop, and is rather... single-minded."

"Trying to take over the world?" Roxanne quipped, quoting the cartoon lab mouse of the same name.

Megamind's reply was unexpectedly in earnest. "No, just trying to take over all the broom closets in the Lair. In that, he's achieved near-total domination. I'd take him offline for reprogramming, but Minion finds him indispensable when it's time to wax the floors. Pinky will do."

The reporter was a bit uneasy. "She — it — she," she decided, since she'd always figured the pink brainbot was some kind of cybernetic female. "She's not going to bite me, or use some kind of pervy surveillance camera on me, is she?"

To her relief, Megamind actually looked offended. "Of course not! I made her in an attempt to improve the other brainbots' behavior, thinking a sort of mother-figure or benign feminine presence might provide missing socialization factors. Really, Ms Ritchi, how many times have I kidnapped you?"

"I lost count somewhere back around two hundred," she admitted.

"Well, I haven't. It's three hundred and twenty-seven."

"That many?" she remarked wryly. "Well, time flies when you're having fun."

The sarcasm was lost on him. "I always gave you time off for holidays and your birthday. So many times in my clutches, and even once, did I ever try something _that _despicable? Really, if I was into vow— view— viow—"

"Voyeurism?" she suggested, amused by his effort to not mispronounce a word he had probably never said correctly in his entire life.

He took the out with nary a batted eyelash. "Yes, that. If I was into it, I could find plenty of material to satisfy my whims via the Internet. I may have been a Master of Villainy, but I am _not _a pervert, _or _a cod—cad! You are my _guest, _in my _home. _I could never _think _of invading your privacy!"

She was almost disappointed by his emphatic certainty. "Never?"

He opened his mouth, then flushed a faint purple before the smallest sound peeped out. He unleashed a huge sigh. "All right, I could _think _of it, I'm not made of stone, after all, but I would never _do _it!"

She couldn't resist. "Not even if I asked you to?" And as expected, he blushed shades of purple, pink, and violet-red that she hadn't known existed. "Just kidding!" she relented with a laugh before his head exploded from the rising pressure within. "I'm not into that, either. Thank you," she added, with complete sincerity. "You may be a villain — or an ex-villain, now — but you're still a gentleman."

It took a few moments, but his color went back to an only slightly flushed version of his normal shade of blue. "Well... thank you," he said, not quite sure if that was the response she wanted (and totally missing her implication that she had never found him frightening), but he figured it was probably safe. "Here we are," he said, indicating a dark, highly polished wooden door, which he opened.

Lights flickered on as they crossed the threshold, but not the strange, oddly hued flickering of industrial fluorescent lighting. This was a softer, warmer light, almost like candlelight, though bright enough to illuminate the entire room. Roxanne looked around, and felt her jaw drop.

Thanks to a design course she'd taken during college, she had memories of the Art Nouveau style as having been at the height of its popularity at the turn of the previous century, a revolution that opposed the rigid styles and forms that were being taught in various academies of the time. It tended to use curves and plant forms and soft colors to achieve a flowing, natural style, but had not abandoned the intricacies that were popular during the Victorian era. Although most people would have thought that Megamind would sneer at such things, she had seen his de-gun and all its purely decorative details and knew better. Its design had been labeled "steampunk" by the few who had actually seen it up close, and while that wasn't an inaccurate description, Roxanne knew enough about that particular design trend to know that part of its roots lay firmly grounded in styles of the same period as Art Nouveau.

Here, as on the de-gun, there were many details that served no purpose but to please the senses. The room was quite large, tiled and paneled and painted in what could best be described as autumn colors. The exposed water piping was shaped so that its many lengths and coils appeared to be artful tangles of copper vines and tendrils, complete with realistic bright copper and pale gold and red bronze leaves. Adding to the effect were many live plants and vines which thrived in low light, for the domed ceiling above was made of deeply stained glass, in a style highly reminiscent of Tiffany's Autumn Landscape window. The room was separated into three distinct areas, a large environmental shower on the right, what looked like a raised pond — not a mere bathtub but a literal pond, surrounded by a semi-circle of lush potted plant life — on the left, and a vanity area complete with a dark marble sink and etched glass mirrors along the far wall between the two. The sandy hued marble floor somehow managed to not be cold, even where there were no rugs to catch errant water, and the surrounds of both shower and pool were tiled in detailed patterns mimicking the design of the glass ceiling.

Roxanne wanted to breathe out, "Wow!" but she was having a hard time just breathing. She had a feeling that her eyes had grown to five times their usual size, as she swore she could feel her jaw actually scraping against her shoes. This "washroom" hidden away in a so-called villain's lair beat the heck out of the most luxurious spa she had ever visited.

Megamind, happily oblivious to her extreme reaction, went in ahead of her, palming hidden switches to activate some extra lighting. Around the ceiling dome, a ring of lights made the rich colors of the glass design glow as if sunlight were flooding through it. "The facilities all use ordinary controls, so you shouldn't have any trouble adjusting the water temperature and flow to your liking. If you need to... er... relieve yourself, those facilities are over there." He indicated a suitably carved wooden door to the right of the shower entrance.

"Did you do all of this?" she managed to half-whisper, though she was still frozen in place.

He nodded. "Most of it. Minion and the brainbots helped with the heavy lifting and installation, but the brainbots are useless when it comes to creativity, and Minion's talents run in other areas. Even villains need hobbies, you know, and this kind of simple detail work helped clear my mind for other, more complex and demanding things."

While the reporter tried to wrap her mind around the concept of anyone referring to all this meticulous work as "simple," her unlikely host opened a cabinet beneath the sink, checking on the supplies stored there. "We have entirely on-demand water heating systems, so don't worry about using too much hot water. The tub is equipped with a whirlpool — very useful for getting rid of some of the aches and pains after another hard day of not winning." He actually sounded unbothered by it.

Roxanne had finally found that she could move again, and had stepped closer to the indoor pond to have a better look. It really _was _huge, big enough to fit at least half a dozen Megaminds with plenty of room to spare. "Do you hold parties in here, or do you just do laps?" she wondered, not entirely in jest.

The alien was completely unoffended; he laughed. "Minion _does _like to get out of his bowl once in a while, and he's not that fond of public pools or the lake, especially late in the season. But you're not that far off the mark; it's also equipped for use as a counter-current swimming pool. Minion isn't the only one who needs regular exercise, and waiting to get it until you're in the middle of a fight with Metro Man — well, I don't recommend it. Way too little, much too late."

Roxanne couldn't stop herself from chuckling. "You mean formal speed walking isn't enough?"

She regretted the remark the moment it left her lips. Megamind's cheerful demeanor instantly vanished, to be replaced by a troubled uneasiness. For a moment, he fiddled aimlessly with something on the marble vanity counter, then lifted his head and whistled. "Pinky will help you with anything you need," he said in an uncharacteristically flat voice as the brainbot floated into the room. "Towels, soap, whatever. Just ask and she'll get it for you." With that, he left, the enthusiastic spring gone from his step, leaving only the soft click of the closing door behind him.

Roxanne wanted to kick herself.

* * *

Author's Note: Some aspects of Megamind's "living quarters" were inspired by concept images from the _Art of Megamind_ book. While none in this story are exactly as depicted, the images definitely gave me ideas...


	2. Chapter 2

_If you're unfamiliar with the look of Art Deco, Google images for Art Deco, Art Deco design, or Art Deco architecture. You'll see a lot of examples.:)_

* * *

II

When the door was closed behind him, Megamind sighed softly and shuffled down the corridor to the rooms beyond, not wanting to hear the hollow sound of his own footsteps echoing off the dark-paneled walls. The next door on the right was of a completely different style than that to the master bath, a set of French doors inset with the streamlined geometric designs of the Art Deco era, in the traditional Deco colors of black, silver, and burgundy red. When he'd made these doors and the room beyond, he had toyed with the idea of adapting the color scheme, substituting his signature electric blue for the red, but he'd decided against it. Though his ego was considerable and often prone to massive demonstrations of rebellion and self-aggrandizement, in this quiet space where he could set aside his public persona, it felt good to know that he could effectively express himself in any way he wished, and succeed. He could be outrageous if he wanted, and he could be traditional if he so desired, or anything in between. Here, there was no outer world to tell him otherwise, no screaming need to be a rebel or a bad boy or anything but himself, in all his many aspects. It was comforting — and right now, he _really _needed comfort.

He was exhausted, both physically and emotionally. He'd lost track of how many hours or even days had passed since he and Minion had left the prison, and until now, there really hadn't been more than a handful of minutes that weren't filled with some kind of pressing need, some intense emotion, _something_. He needed rest, but though his body screamed for it, his mind was so wound up in tangled, knotted thoughts and plans and confused feelings, he didn't know when he'd be able to relax.

The first step in that direction was cleaning up. Tired, Megamind pushed open one of the doors to the master bedroom and stepped inside, unconsciously leaving it ajar behind him as he moved across the polished rosewood floor and lush jet black carpets. The lights came up in response to his movements, revealing a chamber that was every bit as startling in its design as the main bathroom. Excepting a few Victorian touches that would have been noticed only by a trained eye, the room and its furnishings were the height of Art Deco elegance, from the large bed with its arched headboard, inlaid with a stylized sunburst of deep red circles with black and silver rays, to the garnet and black sateen linens and the Deco-styled silver hardware on the smoothly contoured wardrobe and dresser. Tall bookcases with glass fronts in designs similar to the headboard flanked the bed, filled with more gadgetry and drawing pads than actual books; a few of the last were scattered atop the nightstands. Two suitably styled and upholstered chairs and a bench were near an oval mirror, along with a small writing desk; lighting for all was provided by fan-shaped wall sconces that took their inspiration from forms used in the classic Deco summit of the Chrysler Building. The acoustic ceiling tiles mimicked that same design radiating from a central point, thus giving the ceiling an appearance of something akin to a huge stylized white and silver starburst.

The remote for a concealed sound system had somehow wound up on the floor beside the bed, along with a set of wireless earbud headphones, a pair of black pajamas streaked with blue and gold lightning bolts, and a pair of fuzzy black slippers. The brainbots who normally took care of housekeeping chores had dumped the things on the floor when making the bed; that much was obvious from the mangled condition of the slippers, which had no doubt been chewed and torn by a couple of bored bots looking to play when nobody was at home. Megamind stared at them without really seeing them, then shuffled over to one of the chairs and dropped into it.

For a while, he continued to stare at the little heap of cloth and gadgetry before he finally worked up enough energy to slip off his holowatch, peel off his gloves, and remove his boots, all of which felt as if they'd been glued to his skin. By the time he finished with those simple tasks and managed to shrug out of his spiked collar, he was considering just leaning back to take a nap, but the exertion was enough to remind him that he really wasn't all that comfortable in the outfit he was wearing. The outermost layer of his costume was thin and flexible glove leather that was porous enough, but the innermost layer — a skin-tight black body suit of a spandex-like polymer based on the same material as Minion's very first habitat, complete with the concussion dispersal properties that now protected him from the worst super-inflicted damage like nearly weightless armor — wasn't breathable at all, which usually left him feeling quite grungy at the end of a hard fight. Add to that a soaking dip in fountain waters that had slithered under his inner suit, and it wasn't at all surprising that he was feeling rather like something a bottom-feeder might dredge up from inside an old boot found in a particularly filthy river bed just outside the overflow raw discharge pipes from a sewage treatment plant.

The alien started to reach for the zipper at the back of his jumpsuit, and the sigh he'd been about to release became a hiss of pain as the motion aggravated his injured shoulder. He rubbed at the ache, encouraging it to relax enough to ease the pain, then tried again with the other hand. This time, the awkward flex of the elbow reminded him that he'd managed to abrade it when Hal had thrown him against the side of a building, even though the fabric had not torn, thanks to the impact dispersal properties of the lining. He'd been very lucky that way, since the protection could be overwhelmed by too much strong and rapidly repeated punishment, and once torn, the effectiveness of the dispersal ability diminished in direct proportion to the amount of damage the suit suffered.

"Great," he grunted in frustration. If the brainbots had been around, he could've whistled for some to help, but Pinky was occupied, and there was no way he was going to allow the Brain anywhere near his bare skin. Annoyed by this minor helplessness, he picked up his holowatch from where he'd dropped it on the floor beside the chair.

"Minion," he began, then stopped. It wasn't fair for him to ask his old friend to do anything more for him today, not after he'd risked his life and nearly lost it helping in the masquerade to save Roxanne.

Unfortunately, he hadn't stopped soon enough. "Sir?" Minion's voice came back via the watch's communicator. "Do you need something?"

This time, the just barely ex-villain did sigh. "No, it's all right, never mind." The lack of response was enough of an answer. Resigned to finishing what he had started on his own, Megamind attempted a variety of contortions that for a heavier-limbed person might have been impossible. But regardless of how he tried to approach the problem, the nuisancy aches, pains, and scrapes managed to cut short the effort.

Gritting his teeth, he made up his mind that he would get his hand on that blasted zipper pull, no matter how much screaming agony it cost him. He had just managed to touch it with the fingertips of one hand — all the while biting his lower lip just to provide a more painful distraction from the shrieking torment in his right shoulder — when the muscles all along his lower back put in their own protest with a huge, wrenching spasm. With a strangled cry he let go and pulled both arms forward again to stretch the tortured muscles and hopefully end the cramping.

"This is ridiculous!" he muttered to himself as he leaned forward, a position his back seemed to prefer. While it slowly calmed, he planted his elbows on his knees to cradle his forehead in his hands. Maybe he should just bite the bullet and whistle up the Brain...

"There you go, sir," came Minion's gentle voice from behind him as the robotic hands deftly undid the problematic zippers, both for the inner and outer layers of the costume. Megamind looked up, surprised to see him there, having heard neither the opening of a door nor the sound of a single footstep. Minion smiled at his shocked expression. "I'd been expecting that you'd need a hand getting changed, with most of the brainbots out working. I have a few minutes to spare until I need to be back in the kitchen."

The blue alien had been about to insist that he needn't have bothered, but he was too tired to manage even a convincing fib. "Thank you, Minion," he sighed as he began the process of slowly extracting his less achy arm from the tight and damp double suit. "Maybe next time we do a redesign, we should come up with something a little bit easier to get in and out of without help."

"I never mind helping you, sir," the fish insisted as he lent a hand to his master, who was clearly uncomfortable. "It's part of my job, after all."

Megamind managed a wan smile of gratitude. "Perhaps, when I was a child, but now..." He winced slightly as the sticky stuff was peeled from his right shoulder. "Have I thanked you for getting me out of the prison today?"

Minion remained cheerful as he continued to be of assistance. "Of course you did, sir. You apologized to me even before you knew I was there, and at least three times since. I appreciate it. Hmm, it looks like you're going to have quite a bruise on that shoulder. Was there a problem with the impact protection? Did Tighten hit you there?"

"Uhnn...probably. And I hit a wall there, and used that arm to try to hit him, and I think he stepped on my back in about the same place. With that much repeated stress in a matter of minutes, the dispersal field couldn't have had enough time to recover properly to keep me from getting any damage at all. Thankfully, it's _just _a bruise, nothing broken."

"Bet it hurts, though. That... monster was trying to _kill _you, sir." The way he said it, Minion considered this the gravest crime imaginable.

Megamind sighed with relief as the upper half of his body was freed from the clingy leather and polymers with an audible _splurch!_ "Well, he didn't, and he's behind bars, so let's be grateful for that."

"That was a great job you did, bringing him down, sir," the sidekick approved as he went to fetch a robe from the small adjoining bathroom. "Metro Man couldn't have done it better — in fact, I don't think he could've done it at all!"

The blue genius took the black silk robe and slipped into it before standing up to wrestle the rest of himself free of the clingy double layers imprisoning his lower body. For someone with his extroverted flair for the dramatic, his sense of modesty tended to kick in whenever he was injured or ill, a defense against the disquieting feelings of heightened vulnerability stirred up by physical weakness. "Neither could I, without your help," he said honestly. "I'm — I'm sorry about that stupid argument..."

But Minion would have none of it. "No, sir," he said flatly, "there's no reason. It was a misunderstanding, and you don't need to apologize to me for it, not any more than you have already. We both said things we didn't really mean. If I'd understood how you _really_ felt about Ms Ritchi sooner, maybe I could've helped you work things out — but it looks like you managed that on your own."

The green eyes unfocused. "Did I? I wonder..."

There was such uncharacteristic uncertainty in his boss's voice, Minion stopped picking up the discarded pieces of clothing to favor Megamind, his golden-brown eyes full of puzzlement. "Did something just happen that I don't know about, sir? Did you say something? Did _she_ say something? Did Pinky bite her?"

The big head shook. "No, I just... Maybe you were right after all, Minion. I've been a good guy for what, less than a day? Maybe that's just not enough."

"Enough for what?"

He gestured at himself, the sweep of his hands indicating his slender sky-hued body. "To make up for not being human. I can stop being bad, I can do everything possible to make amends for my years of crime, but I can't do _anything _about being what I am. I'm _not _human, no matter how I behave and what I do. I'm stuck with being a short, skinny, blue-skinned, big-headed, bald alien, and I can't change that! I wish I could, but I can't!"

Something in his old friend's frustrated tone struck an odd chord in Minion, one that was off-key and jangled his nerves in an unpleasant way. It brought back a very old but nonetheless painfully clear memory, the echoed voice of young Megamind, so young that he was still an innocent child trying to deal with the pain of knowing that he was unalterably different in a world that too often punished differences:

_"I wish I was like all the other kids! I wanna have hair, an' skin that isn't blue, an' a head that isn't so big and ugly...!"_

Minion shivered from the sensation of a cold that wasn't physical. He went very still as he watched his ward, studied how he stood there, head hanging and narrow shoulders slumped in dejection. "Sir," he began, taking great care to choose his words wisely so as not to exacerbate the situation. "Is that what she said, or is that what _you_ want?"

Megamind shrugged, flinching at the pain the motion reawakened in his right shoulder. "I don't know, Minion. She can't stop bringing up Bernard, and I'm _not_ him! What if she wants me to _be _him, to be a human, to at least _look_ like a human? If I want—"

He shook his head, hoping to dislodge a thought he didn't want to think but couldn't entirely dismiss. When he lifted his face toward Minion, the sadness in it struck the fish like a tsunami. "It's not important what I want," the humanoid continued, resigned.

Before he got any farther, Minion interrupted. "Of _course_ what you want is important! Relationships go both ways, sir, you know that. Isn't that really what our whole falling out was about? You cut me out of the loop, didn't let me know the truth about what was happening, and how was I supposed to know that you'd gotten yourself to a place where you were serious about not being the villain, anymore?

"Sir — Mykaal," he said instead, using his master's real name in an effort to underscore his sincerity, "maybe it's time for me to be completely honest with _you._ Do you know how long I've _wanted _you to make that decision? For real? Oh, I know, when you felt down and frustrated from losing to Metro Man, you talked about giving up being bad, but the longest that ever lasted was until the next morning, when you woke up with some new dastardly plan, and I went along with it because it was my job, to try to protect you and help you be happy in whatever life you chose. I've been hoping and praying that one day, you'd finally give it up for real — but it's been thirty years. After so many disappointments, I'd given up. I didn't know that this time, you were serious. I just wanted to prevent you from what looked like another evil plan that was going to end worse than all the others, because you'd wind up hurt in a way that no medicine could fix. I didn't know you'd _really_ fallen in love. If I had, I would've been in there helping you pick out flowers and figure out a way to tell Ms Ritchi the truth. I want you to be happy, but I didn't think you could do that and still plan to keep on lying to someone you actually cared about."

"Neither did I," Megamind admitted, his head drooping again. "I knew that I cared, but I didn't know how much. I didn't understand that until I heard her practically beg me to help. Oh, Minion, I think I've made a huge mess of everything! I don't know how to be a hero, I can't be a human — even if I can find a way to explain why I tricked her, how can I be things that I'm not?"

To his own surprise, Minion found himself smiling. "Because you're wrong, sir. You _do_ know how to be a hero, you knew how to do that when you were six years old and jumped off a moving bus to come rescue me, even when someone with flashy superpowers wouldn't. You may not look the part, but when you did that, you proved you're more of a hero — and more _human_ — than Wayne Scott and all the people on that bus who wouldn't lift a finger to help. I know you can do this because I've seen you, the real you. You just have to help Ms Ritchi see that part of you, too."

As he'd spoken, Megamind had slowly started to raise his head, the earnestly offered words providing their own lift to his deflated spirits. When Minion was finished, he still wasn't quite convinced, but hope had found its way back into the green eyes. "Do you think I can, Minion?" he asked, again reminding the fish of the boy he had once been, the boy he had known before repeated abuse and unfair rejection at the hands of his peers had changed him.

"I _know _you can, sir," was the firm reply. "You just have to be honest, not just with her but with yourself. Like you were when you thought I was the warden and convinced me to let you out of prison."

The big eyes blinked. "But I didn't know it was you..."

"I know. That's how I knew you _really_ meant it. You just need to figure out how to be honest with Ms Ritchi without hiding behind a disguise. And for you, that should be child's play."

Something in those last words caused an odd spark in Megamind's big brain, a strange connection of past to present. He tried to chase after it and pin it down, but for the moment, it eluded him. He sighed, too tired to continue the pursuit. "Yes, I suppose it should be. Thank you, Minion. I don't know what I've done to deserve you."

"I don't know, either," came the joking reply, "but that's all right. And just for the record, sir, next time you start thinking about making such a big change of direction in your life, give me at least a _little_ heads-up, okay? I really do like Ms Ritchi, and I _didn't _like the things I started thinking about her and about you because I didn't understand how you really felt about her."

"I didn't know it myself, until things went wrong," was the meekly voiced confession. "If there's ever a next time, you'll know as soon as I do, I promise." He sighed, the timidity replaced with slightly less tenuous glimmers of his usual optimism. "Do you really think I can straighten this out without making an even bigger mess of things?"

Minion was happy to fan the flickering flames of hope. "I do, sir — but not now." He almost laughed at the stricken look that rippled across his ward's face. "What I mean to say is that it's been a very long and very hard day for _all_ of us. I can switch into another body — maybe not as awesome a body, but one that still works properly — but you can't. You're tired, you hurt, you're hungry — cut yourself some slack and let the personal damage control wait until you've at least cleaned up, rested a little, and had a decent meal."

Taking care not to cause any additional discomfort, however small, the anthropomorphized fish turned the momentarily stupid genius toward the smaller bathroom connected directly to the bedroom. "Go clean up while I finish taking care of supper, catch a nap if you can. I'll come wake you when everything's ready."

"What about Roxanne?"

"I'll make sure she's taken care of, too. Pinky will let me know if she needs anything unusual, and if she wants to rest, too, I'll show her to the extra bedroom. I think I can convince the Brain to get it ready — I'll make it sound like the room's been taken over by an army of mindless dust bunny drones that need to be conquered. He'll have it done in five minutes!"

Megamind chuckled, knowing that the ploy had worked before on the singleminded little bot. "An excellent idea, Minion, thank you. Just make sure he doesn't try using anything with a beater bar on the privacy screens. It took me weeks to reproduce those rice paper designs the last time he shredded them."

"I'll be sure to disarm him," Minion promised, nudging his boss toward the bathroom. "If you want, I can come back when I'm done in the kitchen and help put some of your special healing ointment on those bruises and scrapes on your back. They look pretty awkward to reach."

"They are," Megamind said most earnestly as he started moving in the direction of Minion's little push. "Yes, I could definitely use the help." He opened the beautifully lacquered door to the washroom and paused on the threshold to look back to where his lifelong guardian had bent over to pick up the things he'd left behind. "And could you see to it that Pinky gives some of the ointment to Roxanne? I don't think she's hurt too badly, but she might appreciate anything to help ease the discomfort."

Minion nodded as he finished collecting the discarded clothing. "That's very thoughtful of you, sir, I'm sure she'll appreciate it. I'll take care of everything, don't worry. Remember, we should be celebrating! This time, you won, for real!"

That thought did more to lift the newborn hero's wilted and weary spirits than anything else. "Yes, _we _won. Don't forget it was a team effort, for all three of us."

"That's right, sir," came the chipper approval. "And don't forget to mention that to Ms Ritchi. She was awfully brave, today."

Megamind smiled, that reminder helping him begin to see just how he might be able to pull off what had seemed impossible only moments before. "Oh, I won't forget, Minion," he vowed. "Never again."

_

* * *

_

Author's Notes: The references to Megamind's real name and his childhood are from my novel, _Naughty or Nice?_ The idea for how Megamind might use highly advanced technology to protect himself from getting smashed by a superpowered nemesis came from my ponderings about Minion's "hamster ball" seen early in the movie, as well as the fact that when we see Megamind suiting up into the Black Mamba, under all those layers, he's wearing what appears to be yet another plain black bodysuit. I wondered if it served a purpose (aside from making the leather more comfortable to wear), then cross-pollinated it with my speculations about the ball having a kind of concussion dispersal property to protect its occupant. I could easily see Megamind trying to figure out how it works, and after a few years of reverse engineering, _voila! _a kind of extremely protective "underwear." Additional thoughts along this line will be forthcoming.


	3. Chapter 3

III

After the door had closed, Roxanne stared at it, feeling as if she'd managed to stuff both feet into her mouth for about the sixth time in the last hour. Even though she knew she hadn't been _that _bad, it seemed as if her last ill-timed remark was equivalent to at least six months' worth of social blunders. Okay, there were still a lot unresolved issues between her and Megamind, but there was no way they were going to sort them out and get to whatever lay past them if she kept thinking about "Bernard," no matter how pleasant most of those memories might be.

The trouble was, when she thought of "Megamind," there were all those years of kidnapping and pointless fights with Metro Man to remember as well, along with the thought that if he hadn't started the abduction bit to begin with — never mind that she'd never truly been frightened — the whole Bernard charade would not have been needed.

_Then again,_ she reflected, _maybe it would have._ Roxanne was well aware of all the various articles that had been done about the frequency with which she had been kidnapped by Megamind, and whether or not she was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result. Over the last ten years, her various bosses had "requested" that she be tested by a variety of psychologists and psychiatrists, just to make sure she wasn't harboring hidden problems that might someday manifest in ways that would be a liability to the station. After the first few times, she'd been reasonably sure that she wasn't suffering from submerged trauma — Megamind and his gizmos looked and sounded more terrifying than they actually were, and she was a sharp enough reporter to figure that out very quickly — but she'd gone in to be tested, both to protect her job and out of some admitted curiosity. If her peculiar life was leaving behind cobwebs of weirdness that could someday reach critical mass and blow her mind for real, she wanted to know about it. And she seemed to remember...

A strangely high-pitched and querulous _bowg _not far from her shoulder interrupted Roxanne's reflections, dragging her back to the here-and-now. Pinky — perhaps the oddest of all the brainbots she'd become familiar with over the years — was hovering nearby, her eyestalk demurely retracted even though she was obviously curious. There had never been guests allowed in this part of the Lair; even most of the bots were programmed to stay out (though it was a common game among them to see if they could sneak in anyway, just to surprise Daddy). Pinky often pulled bathroom duty, which she didn't mind, unless Daddy and Minion went overboard with the water fights in the pool and left the whole floor under water. She knew just where everything was, and she enjoyed keeping the different bottles and tubes and brushes and such in perfect order, even though she had no idea what most of it was really for. Now, she looked at Ms Ritchi, curious to know why Daddy's favorite guest had been allowed up here, yet perfectly happy to follow instructions. Pinky knew that Daddy liked Ms Ritchi (the other bots had thought she had blown a few critical circuits when she'd started insisting that this was so, and she would enjoy rubbing their eyestalks in the proof of her claim), so she was interested in having such a good chance for closer observation.

Roxanne smiled at the odd little bot, not exactly sure what to do, but also uncomfortable just standing there staring at the thing while it stared back with its single, unblinking eye. "Uh, hi, Pinky," she said, feeling a tad foolish. "Long time, no see." Well, that _was_ just lame. "I guess you're here to help, right?" The way Pinky bowged and bobbed, she knew she was getting an enthusiastic yes. "Okay, then. Well, I guess I could use some towels and soap and maybe a bath sponge..."

The request met with instant approval as Pinky zipped off into different cabinets and cupboards. She first returned with a huge pile of fluffy white towels and washcloths, then zoomed off again to fetch a long-handled back scrubber and several soft sponges, then made one final trip and returned with a silver wire basket filled with an assortment of soaps, both liquid and solid, of various colors and scents.

The reporter blinked, frankly amazed. "Wow, I was expecting black towels for some reason — and what's up with all these soaps? Does your boss have a soap collecting hobby?"

Pinky bowged in a strange way, and when all Roxanne could do was frown in confusion, she carefully extended her long tendril arm to delicately touch the tip of the woman's nose. "Bowg, bowg, bowg!" she said in short bursts, almost like a sneeze.

"He has allergies?" Roxanne ventured. Pinky bobbed in a clearly negative fashion, then bowged again, in shorter and lighter bursts that sounded more like sniffing. "He likes different smells?" Pinky waggled her entire body, very obviously saying yes and no. She touched Roxanne's nose again, so lightly that it felt like a tickle. The reporter laughed. "Hey, none of that, I'm — oh, I get it! Megamind's sensitive to smells?" Now, the bot nodded emphatically. "And he likes a lot of different scents?" Pinky was in virtual rapture over her understanding.

Roxanne couldn't help but chuckle, though wryly. "Well, you'd think _he'd _have wanted to wash the stupid bag, then — unless he considered it a kind of weird way to torture me to finally get me to scream. Okay, I get it, Pinky, thanks. There wouldn't happen to be any shampoo around here, would there? No, wait, forget that, it was a stupid question!" she added hastily when the bot first appeared deflated by what was certainly a no, since Daddy was bald, then lit up with a sort of determination to fulfill the request. "I can make do with what's here, no problem." She was relieved when Pinky accepted that. She was afraid she'd already inadvertently offended her host, and she didn't want to risk doing it again. "Would you mind leaving for a little while so I can undress in private?"

The sound Pinky made was one of understanding, as if she knew how it felt, being the only apparent female in a Lair full of males. She extended her eyestalk, flicking the lens back and forth, between Roxanne and the outer door, until the reporter got it. "You'll wait out in the hall until I need you?" The bot nodded. "That's great, Pinky, thanks."

She was about to kick off her shoes when it occurred to her that Pinky might need help getting out, since Megamind had closed the door when he'd left, but as she turned to ask, she saw that the little bot was quite capable of handling it on her own, using her tendril arm to press down on the lever style door handle until the latch released and the door opened. She pulled it wide enough so that she could slip out, then closed it behind her.

Alone now, Roxanne stretched her back and sighed, trying to decide if she'd prefer the shower or the pool. Both were tempting, and in the end, she opted for the pool. Her whole aching body had screamed "Yes!" when Megamind had mentioned the whirlpool, and she figured she'd earned the indulgence.

She wasn't exactly sure how this would work, since the pool appeared to be full already, but the taps and controls looked pretty much like those for the jacuzzis she'd used at hotels and spas, except for those that were plainly labeled for controlling the counter-current devices. The only difference was a large button beside the taps, with the instruction _reset before use. _For a second, she thought of summoning Pinky, then decided that nothing bad would happen if she followed the directions. Just as she was about to press the button, she reconsidered that decision, thinking of all the weird and wacky things that she'd seen happen in the Lair whenever buttons were pressed. Then again, this was Megamind's home, not his workshops and labs, and she had a feeling he wouldn't want to do a lot of unnecessary clean up by turning his bathroom into a science experiment. Deciding once and for all, she pushed the button.

In response, what must have been at least a dozen drains opened somewhere at the bottom of the pool, as the water level abruptly started to drop. In less than two minutes, it was empty, and Roxanne heard the click of the things closing again. With that done, she turned on the taps, testing until she reached the level of warmth she desired. There must have been several inlets as well, although the tub didn't fill quite as quickly as it had emptied.

While it was doing so, she stripped off her grungy outer clothes, thinking that she might want to burn them later, then selected one of the soaps. Really, the variety of fragrances was astonishing, everything from spices and herbs to woodsy scents and even some subtle floral combinations that were more clean than sweet, not feminine. She had known for a long time that contrary to stereotypical bad guy images, Megamind was always clean, though not to the point at which one would suspect some kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder, or prissy vanity. An unusually sharp and appreciative sense of smell would explain it, of course, but his cleanliness was something Roxanne had never really thought about after first noting it, considering it a small upside in an otherwise generally exasperating relationship.

_How many other things have I missed? _she wondered. This was certainly turning into a day of one surprise after another! With a small sigh, she checked the pool and saw that it was just about full. She reached for the knobs to shut off the water, and was startled when they turned on their own, shutting off the flow before the tub became overfull. She snorted, smiling crookedly.

"They work just like ordinary knobs, eh?" she said, repeating what Megamind had told her. "Right, like anything around here is _ordinary." _Oh, well, at least this was an actually helpful kind of out of the ordinary, so Roxanne shrugged it off and turned her attention to the more serious matter of selecting a soap, given the wide number of choices. After a minute of simply looking to see what was available, she gave up, closed her eyes, and just grabbed one, having seen nothing she found offensive. She came up with a tube of an imported all-natural body wash with a pleasant scent of mixed herbs and lavender, not the least bit perfumey or overpowering. That was logical; to someone with an acute sense of smell, a lot of the heavily overfragranced stuff on the market would probably be repulsive, not pleasing. Another thing to add to her growing catalog of new information about the now reforming villain.

The controls for the whirlpool were situated at a corner of the tub near the underwater jets, within easy reach of the person using them — and now, Roxanne found herself grateful for the fact that she and Megamind were near the same height. If this had been, say, Wayne Scott's place, she'd be torturing her aching muscles just trying to reach them. She set her chosen supplies on the tiled ledge near the controls, then slipped out of the last of her clothes and into the tub.

When she turned it on, there was a slight delay as two panels slid up from the bottom of the pool and locked into place, creating a smaller tub within the large one. The jets then activated, and the massage of the whirlpool was like heaven. The caress of the bubbling streams of warm water was intoxicating, and Roxanne decided to just lean back and enjoy it for a while. Happily, there was a curve built into the lip of the tub behind her head that perfectly cradled it and her neck so that they were comfortable even without a pillow. She imagined Megamind had made it for this very purpose, though it probably fit his huge cranium and long, slender neck a bit differently. No matter. It was still comfortable, and Roxanne let herself enjoy it. After several minutes of studying the exquisite stained glass dome above, she closed her eyes and listened to the soothing sound of the rushing water, allowing herself the even greater luxury of not thinking for a while.

She had completely lost track of the time — and may well have dozed off for a bit — when a familiar little _bowg _stirred her drifting mind and prompted her to open her eyes. Pinky was hovering beside the tub, keeping a discreet distance, her eyestalk once again retracted so as not to appear to be ogling the guest. Roxanne managed a lazy smile. "Hi, Pinky, is something up?"

The little bot bowged an affirmative, extending her tendril arm toward Roxanne. In it she held a small blue plastic jar; her motion indicated that Roxanne should take it. The reporter did so, curious. "What's this?" she wondered aloud. She turned the thing in her hand, and saw that its lid was neatly labeled:

**Megamind's incredibly brilliant secret formula  
all-natural organic cellular regeneration accelerating antiseptic analgesic and moisturizing ointment  
No sulfates, sulfites, petroleum derivates or revolting animal byproducts  
No barbaric animal testing was used for this product  
100% Hypoallergenic**

Roxanne couldn't smother her laugh. Leave it to Megamind to stick a remarkably professional-looking label on some concoction of his own, as if he planned to mass-market it. "Is this from your boss?" she asked Pinky, who bowged her version of yes. "For my aches and pains and owies?" Pinky again confirmed it. "Aw, that's sweet of him."

But another thought occurred to her. "Is it safe? I mean, for a human? It won't turn my skin blue or make me grow scales, will it?" To that, Pinky could only shrug, having no skin of her own, and never having seen the stuff used by anyone but Daddy or Minion.

Roxanne studied the label again, then gave a shrug of her own. "Well, I guess it's okay, he's never done anything to hurt me before, not on purpose, and I don't know why he would start now. Thanks, Pinky, this'll come in handy." Her mission successfully completed, Pinky bowged happily, then again retreated to the hallway to let their guest finish her bath in peace.

The reporter leaned back again, still not quite ready to shut off the whirlpool. She hadn't started to go all pruney yet, so she figured she could afford at least a few more minutes of bliss. She looked at the jar again, removed the lid to sniff the clear ointment, and found that it was indeed free of any discernible fragrance. Which was good, because if she'd detected some weird chemical stink, she might've been afraid to use it. Still, she thought as she closed the jar and set it aside for now, it was as she'd told Pinky and all the psych professionals who'd ever examined her: in spite of all the kidnappings and the mayhem Megamind caused to happen around or near Roxanne, he had never once intentionally hurt her. Even the accidental hurts had been incredibly minor, and very obviously just that, accidents. She just didn't think it was possible for her to be afraid of him.

The therapists had always been highly skeptical, of course. They maintained that there was no way a person could live through so many abductions and not be affected by them, especially given some of the horrifying incidents she'd lived through, thanks to Megamind.

Now, this was a point that always made Roxanne wonder: what did the therapists think was so horrible? Everybody knew that Megamind was basically harmless, so long as you stayed out of the way during his fights with Metro Man and didn't do anything to annoy him into proving his villainous nature by painting your car windows black with blue scowly faces, or plugging your water lines with Lima beans and your chimney with caramel-coated popcorn. The fights did property damage, sure, and some of the traffic jams they caused were a major headache to the entire city. The scattered detritus from his more spectacular failures could be inconvenient, but as far as Roxanne knew, the worst harm anyone had ever suffered as a result of the so-called supervillain's acts was a scraped knee, a bump on the head, a mild sunburn, ringing ears, or a serious but temporary aversion to quiescently frozen confections. The only head he ever planned to hurt a hair on was Wayne Scott's, and there were days when Roxanne felt that if Megamind could sneak into the superhero's house in the middle of the night and shave his head, he would be deliriously happy. Heck, he'd even sent in Pinky with stuff to help her aches and pains and hurts...

_"Are you hurt?"_

The phrase suddenly rang clear as a bell in Roxanne's head, the tone both solicitous and angry, the voice undoubtedly Megamind's. Her brow furrowed as she tried to remember when she'd heard him say that. Earlier in the day, of course, he'd asked it when the jubilation over Titan's defeat had begun to calm down a bit — but no, he'd asked if she was all right then, hadn't he? He'd asked if she was injured, if she was okay, and it hadn't been in that peculiar tone of voice. Solicitous, yes, unquestionably, but angry? No, not at all.

What was she remembering?

For at least a full five minutes, she tried to bring the snip of a memory into fuller focus, but though that phrase remained crystal clear, nothing more would come. It was frustrating, and no amount of intense concentration or deliberate relaxation would change it. She had half-convinced herself that it was just a figment of her exhausted imagination and decided to let it go, for now.

She finally felt that she'd soaked long enough and moving on to the next step of washing off the remaining crud of the day's exertions was appealing. She shut off the whirlpool, causing the extra side panels to drop back into the bottom of the tub. She lathered up the sponge and back brush with the liquid soap and scrubbed away, enjoying the clean fragrance as the soap bubbles swept the dirt from her skin and wafted clear some of the muzziness in her brain. There were a few spots that could definitely use Megamind's ointment, and she took care when washing around them. She used a bit of the mild soap to clean her hair, twice, then ducked her entire body under the surface to rinse off.

The sensation of the water — which kept circulating even with the whirlpool turned off, whisking away any soap-scummy water and replacing it with fresh — taking with it both the real and symbolic dirt of that last encounter with Hal was incredibly refreshing. On impulse, she ducked under again, saw just how large the pool really was, and kicked off from the side. She actually needed to take a stroke to finally reach the far end, where the jets to generate the counter current were located. There was plenty of room to exercise — and, she abruptly realized, plenty of space and privacy for the two alien friends to interact in an environment where Minion didn't need any special suit or bowl, and no one would bother them. She hadn't imagined Megamind as the type to go in for swimming, but with a best friend who was a fish, it made perfect sense.

Amazed once again by all the little things she was discovering about the blue alien, Roxanne flipped onto her back and kicked off to float back to the other side, appreciating the gorgeous glass dome and the copper tendrils of water pipes with their clinging green vines above her. When she gently bumped up against the opposite edge of the pool, she flipped again and climbed out. As she dried herself, she considered summoning Pinky to ask for a blow dryer, but realized even as she thought it that a nearly hairless alien had about as much use for that as he would for shampoo and a comb. She knew she had the last in her purse, so she towel dried her hair and wrapped a towel about her head until she finished with the rest of her body.

She was glad that the room was warm, since back in her apartment, she hadn't found a robe or even a nightgown or set of pajamas that hadn't been ruined either from burning laser vision or broken water pipes. Fortunately, two of the towels Pinky had brought were large bath sheets, so she was able to wrap one about her like a sarong while she went about applying the healing ointment to her assorted injuries. The majority were things like scraped knees and elbows, but she could feel a few blossoming bruises on her butt and the backs of her thighs, the result of the rough but necessary bounce she'd taken from the hoverbike to the storefront awnings, saving her from a far rougher landing on the pavement. The ointment was very light, more like aloe vera gel than any salve she had ever used, and it absorbed very quickly. It lived up to its claims and more; it took only a few moments after it was smoothed onto the injuries for their pain to fade to a dramatically more tolerable level. She closed her eyes to appreciate the relief while she rubbed some onto the upper back of her left thigh.

_"Are you hurt? I mean, of course you're hurt, but do you have any injuries? Were you hit? Can you understand me?"_

Roxanne's breath caught as the memory rushed into her mind like the sharp edge of a bitter winter wind. It was Megamind's voice, again with that strange mixture of worry and anger — no, more than anger. Fury. He was furious, but not with her. She could see his face, his expression one of tightly controlled rage, everywhere but in his eyes. They were weirdly bright, like the eyes of a cat hiding in the shadows, catching the smallest glints of light so that they burned with green fire. But the burning was somehow one of genuine concern, and he looked her straight in the eye, nowhere else. She couldn't answer, she didn't know why. Yet she knew with utter certainty that this hadn't happened today. There was darkness all around, but it was natural night, not the black of a dramatic cloud darkening the daylight for the sake of a villainous effect. And he didn't look right. He looked... younger. Not that he looked old even now — Roxanne had always felt that the alien would probably have to be closing in on a hundred before he'd start to show his age, damn that flawless blue skin — but he was definitely younger, more as he'd appeared over ten years ago, when they'd met face to face for the first time, when he'd first kidnapped her. Even a bit younger, in fact, since she couldn't recall having ever seen him in the flesh without his precisely trimmed goatee.

Then when had this happened?

She opened her eyes; her head spun slightly, the way it might when one stood too quickly after sitting for too long — only she was still perched on the edge of the tub. She rubbed the bridge of her nose, an attempt to massage away the peculiar feelings and the even more peculiar images in her head. The physical sensations passed, but those in her mind did not. She was strongly inclined to dismiss this as the result of too much stress, too little sleep, and not enough nourishment. Heaven knew, that combination had brought her to the brink of fainting more than once in her life, and had even given her some brief but wild daydreams. Her doctor and the psychoanalysts had told her that it was not unusual for the severely sleep deprived to experience such things as their bodies tried to grab quick snatches of sleep whenever they could. Maybe this was one of those times; she certainly felt tired enough, and hungry enough. But it seemed so_ real._

She sighed, tried to put the whole thing out of her mind, and finished anointing her wounds. When she was done, she kicked aside the heap of "Tighten" befouled clothes and searched her satchel for fresh things. Hal hadn't left much intact, and that thought alone elicited a shudder. She'd considered him weird and creepy for a long time, but had figured that he was basically harmless, so long as she could keep him at a distance. She'd _never _thought that he could be so genuinely twisted, and she was pretty damn sure that acquiring superpowers had only brought out depths of a sickness that had already been there. He had shown no remorse for his abuse of those powers, not one bit...

_"Monsters! Savage, brainless, inhuman __monsters__...!"_

The words echoed in her head, very aptly describing what Hal had become; she could understand how Megamind might have felt that way toward his so-called heroic pupil gone bad — but there had been only one of him. And even when the alien had stood there in her apartment, pleading with her to help him, his clothing decimated by Hal's first attempts to kill him, he hadn't spoken of him with such white-hot fury.

Roxanne shook her head to clear it as she pulled some clean underwear, a loose white t-shirt, and a pair of pink sweatpants from her bag. The faint dizziness she felt while she dressed made her wonder if her tired mind wasn't concocting these bizarre images by cross-pollinating many bits of unrelated memories. She clearly remembered Megamind calling the crowd near the fountain savages when he'd misinterpreted their joyful enthusiasm as an attack. It had to be something like that, hallucinations cooked up by a brain running on too little sleep and too much stress. Her stomach growled at her and reminded her that she needed a decent meal, too. Maybe after that and a nap, things in her head would settle back to normal.

She found a pair of clean white socks in her bag and pulled them onto her feet in lieu of slippers. From what she'd seen of the floors in this part of the Lair, she needn't concern herself about stepping on anything that might trip or hurt her, as might happen only too easily on the working floor below. She smiled softly, thinking that the Brain did a pretty good job with this part of his domain, keeping it spotlessly clean. She was about to call for Pinky and ask what could be done to dispose of her dirty clothes when a light tap sounded on the door.

"Ms Ritchi?"

She recognized the voice at once. "Come on in, Minion," she replied gladly, since he'd be much easier to communicate with than a brainbot. "I'm just about finished."

The fishy sidekick entered a bit shyly, just in case she wasn't ready enough to suit his sense of propriety. To his relief, Roxanne was completely dressed, and was bringing out her comb to deal with her damp hair. He smiled pleasantly. "Did you enjoy the pool?" he asked, having heard the telltale sounds of the water jets even through the well-soundproofed walls of the living quarters.

She smiled at him while she made quick work of her hair. "It's great," she admitted. "I wish I had a set-up like this at home, though I think it's bigger than my whole apartment!"

Minion chuckled. "It _is _pretty extravagant, but I'm glad the Boss thought of it. I enjoy a good long swim now and then, and the lake _really_ needs better pollution control. I'm thinking that now that we're the good guys, I might ask him to find a way to clean it up properly. He's been wanting to try windsurfing, but he doesn't like the water conditions any more than I do. Especially when the lake weed washes onshore during the summer." He made a disgusted face that Roxanne understood very well indeed.

"I know, my apartment isn't that far from the waterfront, and when the wind blows from the wrong direction on hot afternoons..." She made an exaggerated gagging sound. "I think Pinky tried to tell me that Megamind has a sensitivity to smells. If he does, how does he stand living so close to the shore?"

"Huge air filtration systems," Minion said, in dead earnest. "Maybe it's something the brainbots can help with, now, keeping the shoreline clean to reduce the stench."

"That's a great idea. And speaking of stench, do you guys have an incinerator I can use to get rid of these things?" She kicked the small heap of her discarded clothes. "After today, I don't think they can be washed clean enough for me to ever want to wear them again."

The fish nodded. "Sure thing, if that's what you want. I'll have Pinky take care of it when she comes to clean the room. I came to see if you'd like to have your dinner now, since Sir said that you were hungry. He's sleeping, and I want to give him at least an hour before I wake him up. He was pretty exhausted."

Roxanne agreed. "It's been a hard day for him — but a good one, too. He really surprised the whole city, becoming the hero, though I think he always had it in him."

"He has, definitely," was Minion's knowing reply. "And no one was happier than I was to finally see him make the change. If you'd rather rest first, I'll show you to the spare bedroom. The Brain's just about finished getting it ready."

Roxanne grinned at the thought of the singleminded bot exercising his complete control over dust and dirt. "Thanks, but I think I need to eat more. My stomach's been growling so loudly, I'm afraid we'll start hearing complaints about secret underwater testing in Lake Michigan."

Minion laughed easily enough — even though he knew the Boss had done just that from time to time, though not with nuclear weapons. Pinky came floating into the room, and he gave her instructions to dispose of the dirty clothes and then take Ms Ritchi's bag to the guest room. The bot chirped happily, so obviously pleased for the chance to help her, Roxanne had a feeling that she had just made a cybernetic friend for life.

If Minion hadn't been there to show her to the kitchen, the reporter's nose would have led her directly to it. The delicious aromas set her mouth to watering and her stomach to growling again. The kitchen, she found, was a remarkable reproduction of classic 1950s diner decor, lacking only a literal dining counter and stools to complete the image. "The Boss wanted to do the whole thing, counter and all," the sidekick explained as he gestured Roxanne to a seat at the traditional dinette table. "I didn't think it was very homey, though, and since I do most of the cooking — 'cause he'd try living off junk food or lab concoctions if I didn't — he made everything the way I wanted."

Roxanne smiled wryly. "So, no formal dining room?"

"Oh, no," Minion replied as he dished up the Phat Thai for her. "We have one. The Boss wanted to try his hand at all the traditional kinds of rooms. It's the coolest looking futuristic design you've ever seen, very Calatrava inspired. But we never use it."

"Never?"

Minion shrugged. "Well, I guess that's not quite true, we did use it a few times right after he finished it. But that was a long time ago. It made him feel bad, sitting at a big table when it was always only the two of us. It's better in here. There, it felt... lonely."

Roxanne simply nodded, understanding only too well. Loneliness crept into one's soul most easily — and insidiously — in the emptiness of everyday needs left unfulfilled. Nothing more needed to be said.

Minion brought her a large bowlful of rice noodles with stir-fried vegetables and chicken, prepared and spiced in the Thai tradition, with a slight variation. "I'm not a big fan of fish sauce," the alien ichthyoid admitted. "Not that I consider it cannibalism, but I think it'd be sort of like humans eating monkeys. A little too close for comfort. I've found other things that come close to the same flavor, without the barbarism. And I go easy on the hot spices, since Sir's taste buds are almost as sensitive as his nose."

The image of Megamind as one of those macho guys who didn't consider food hot enough until it made their eyes bleed was so ludicrous, Roxanne couldn't help but grin as she sampled the food. "It's delicious," she declared in complete honesty, and Minion was delighted. He served her as much as she wanted, along with tea and lemon water, and they chatted companionably about their personal adventures in cooking. For a fish, Minion was an excellent conversationalist, and the reporter found herself both intrigued and amused by his anecdotes. She shared a few kitchen misadventures of her own, and when she was sated, they sat together in comfortable quiet while she sipped the last of her tea.

Finally, she felt a yawn coming on, and struggled to hide it. She was tired, but she was also a little leery of trying to sleep, fearing that it might bring on a doozy of a nightmare, what with the strange maybe-memories that had been flashing through her brain. She told herself that she was being silly, since sleep was very likely just the cure she needed to get rid of the hallucinations, but something in her didn't quite believe it — maybe because she wasn't entirely convinced that they _were _hallucinations.

Unbidden, a question came to her lips. "Minion, do you remember the first time I met Megamind?"

The fish was perfectly at ease with the query. "You mean the first time he kidnapped you? Oh, sure, it was after your first big series of one-on-one interviews with Metro Man, and he'd spent four months trying to contact you to get you to interview _him, _so he'd have equal time to air his side of the whole rivalry..."

Roxanne shook her head. "No, I mean before that. The first time we _met."_

Minion regarded her with the strangest expression, one that made Roxanne think that he was about to call for the men in the white suits. "I'm... not sure what you mean," he said slowly. "Don't you remember the first kidnapping? I would've thought that sort of thing would be kinda memorable..."

"Oh, I remember _that," _Roxanne assured him. "I'd planned a big night on the town with friends to celebrate my promotion to regular on-screen reporting, and it got blown to pieces, almost literally. Those friends stopped wanting to hang out with me after that, and I was never so ticked off at anybody as I was at him! No, there was something earlier than that, I'm almost sure of it."

"What makes you say that?" Minion asked after another noticeable pause.

She tried to concentrate on what little was clear before answering. "Because I keep getting these flashes of something I can't quite remember. I hear Megamind asking me if I'm hurt, and he sounds like he's mad enough to chew steel, but when he looks at me, he's worried. He looks me right in the eye, like he doesn't want to see anything else, and I can see he's really bothered about something, but I don't know what. Then he says something about inhuman monsters — and I think it's kind of weird, him talking about being inhuman, because he's literally _not _human, though for some reason I'm not thinking that _he's_ the real monster, but I don't know what is. And he looks... different. Younger, younger than he was before that first kidnapping. I'm not sure because it's pretty dark, but I don't think he has his goatee yet, and I know he did the first time I was kidnapped."

Minion's silence told Roxanne that maybe she should've kept her mouth shut, that perhaps her sleep deprived hallucinations had offended him. She sighed, and ran one hand through her hair. "Sorry," she apologized, "I'm probably just imagining this. Megamind was supposed to be a supervillain, but Hal really _was. _That's a little hard to process, and I guess everything that happened today has just messed with my head. I don't know how it is for fish, but when humans get too tired, they can start seeing and hearing things that just aren't real. The brain goes a little haywire. I shouldn't've mentioned it; it's probably nothing but a freaky dream." She summoned her best smile of both apology and gratitude. "Thanks for the dinner, Minion, it was delicious."

"You're welcome." Another pause. "And Ms Ritchi?"

"Yes?"

Minion hesitated once more, then summoned his courage and just said it. "You're right. You _did _meet Megamind before he kidnapped you."

She stared at the sidekick, not quite believing her ears. With a sigh of surrender to the inevitable, Minion quietly began to tell the reporter the tale of her _real_ first face-to-face meeting with the Boss.

And as she listened, floodgates in her mind were unlocked. Through them came the great wave of remembered horror that so many therapists had feared must exist. It rushed into Roxanne's conscious mind like the crash of a massive tsunami, and destroyed forever the world as she had known it.

_

* * *

_

Author's Note: Santiago Calatrava is a Spanish architect, designer of many beautiful and elegant buildings and structures that are sometimes referred to as futuristic (a Google or Wiki search for him will turn up images of many of his most renowned works). I couldn't resist the nod to him, as he was the designer of the gorgeous new Art Museum in my hometown of Milwaukee (and if you go looking for pictures of it, try to find one of the exterior with the _brise soleil_ opened. It's quite impressive).


	4. Chapter 4

**WARNING: high emotional intensity levels ahead (indirect violence in later portions may border on Mature for some readers). Please proceed with caution.**

* * *

IV

_Eleven years earlier_

When it came to a choice of careers, Roxanne Ritchi — former star reporter at KSDQ News in Coppertown, Michigan (not to be confused with Copper City, Ironwood, Iron River, Iron Mountain, or any of the other more prominent mining and lumber towns of Michigan's Upper Peninsula) — had decided that journalism sucked. Oh, not that she regretted taking a new job here in Metro City, which was a top tier market and sufficiently farther south so that she no longer felt as if she were living where summer lasted for about three weeks, tops. She was actually fond of the Midwest, having been born and raised in it, and she enjoyed the challenge of finding stories that would go national, thus disproving many of her colleagues' belief that the only news worth noticing in the Great Lakes states came out of Chicago — and even the Windy City, they felt, hadn't had much to brag about since the end of Prohibition and gangsters like Al Capone. Sure, she had been getting ribbed for years over the jobs she'd taken while climbing up the ladder of obscurity, often at low power stations so new to the air, they wound up violating the normal call letter conventions in search of four letters that weren't already spoken for, somewhere in the country. Even her new job at KMCP in Metro City fell into that category.

Still, Roxanne hadn't been bothered by that. KMCP may have once been little more than a local community access and shopping channel, but in recent years it had been gaining a bigger audience share and thus a better reputation, thanks to a nearly ten-year-old ongoing grudge match between the city's home-grown superhero, Metro Man, and his obviously not so home-grown but nonetheless lifelong local supervillain, Megamind. Here in the big city there was a chance for promotion and real career advancement, unlike her situation in Copperville, where she'd been everything from news anchor, beat reporter, copywriter, weather girl, sports announcer, and even sometimes cameraman (whenever the usual operator and janitor, Judd Latzke, had a dental appointment or a date with his girlfriend). Here, her job was a lot less stressful — and a lot more boring. She'd understood that at KMCP she'd no longer be a star, but she at least had expected _some_ on-screen time, not the endless rounds of repetitive research for equally redundant articles, analyzing every aspect of Metro Man's day, from the brand of toothbrush he used in the morning to his favorite bedtime snack at night.

And she'd thought that covering such newsworthy items as goats stuck on a roof and the latest snowfall totals from the Lake Superior Snow Machine were banal. Yes, if this was the reality of big city journalism, it most definitely sucked. Big time. At least the goats actually ate somebody's homework once in a while and caused a genuine fuss.

Which was why Roxanne was determined to find a way out of the Metro Man trivia research hell in which her current position had her trapped. She was certain that these never-ending battles between cheesy good and melodramatic evil had to have a meatier side to them, something more than the absurd banter, the business as usual combat, the showy costumes and fangirl swooning over the perfectly coiffed hero (or once in a great while the perfectly bald villain. _That _at least offered a brief if peculiar change of pace). She'd heard the rumors from other people in the news business that the whole Metro Man versus Megamind shtick was nothing more than a product whipped up by the Metro County Chamber of Commerce, to boost tourism revenue after the area's heavy industry went bust during the rust belt years of the late 1980s.

There was no doubt that the income and available jobs from the region's industrial base had collapsed pretty badly back then; there were still parts of Metro City itself that were considered rough and dangerous, since gangs and hoods had taken over most of them once the factories and businesses went bankrupt. Now, well over a decade later, many of those buildings in that district — generally known as Rustville — were still empty, many of the streets around them little used by any but the seamiest parts of the local underworld. The only area they seemed to have no interest in taking over was the westernmost section, which was situated on a narrow, curving spit of land that stuck well out into the lake and thus provided few routes in or out of that neighborhood for hoods who wanted to avoid having their comings and goings and generally unsavory activities noticed. The onshore regions that were now their purview, especially at night, had been dubbed Gangland by the local media. Some of the gangs considered this a source of pride, and their graffiti marked the entrances to their domain.

Because of that, however, it did not surprise Roxanne when she'd realized that more than a few of the larger and quite spectacular super-battles happened to take place in Rustville, or out over the lake. If the rumors were at all accurate, it was possible that they were chosen as the staging areas because they posed the least risk to the general populace, who, with either location, could sit back and still see the show from a comfortably safe distance. When they were offshore, in fact, Roxanne was reminded of the Fourth of July in Copperville, where the annual fireworks display was launched from the safety of a barge on Lake Superior. They did the same sort of thing here, though Roxanne had missed it during her first year in town.

Being a naturally inquisitive person, the longer Roxanne lived and worked in Metro City, the more she wondered just how accurate the rumors were, and whether or not anyone had tried to prove or disprove them. She was positive that Metro Man's powers were not faked, as she'd been a witness to several of his rescues that could not have been planned, and had seen him do things no ordinary person could do, no matter how sophisticated their special effects equipment might be. Metro Man was the real thing, of that Roxanne was certain.

She wasn't so sure about this Megamind character, mostly because all of his "super" aspects were totally gadget-based, and almost nobody seemed to take him or his threats seriously. In the year since she'd settled in Metro City, she hadn't seen him come anywhere near defeating his rival, which, according to her co-workers, was par for the course. Nobody denied that the guy was clever, since he was able to escape from prison as easily as walking through a revolving door (which tended to make Roxanne think the tourism rumors were true), and the myriad gizmos he whipped up to fight his nemesis and "terrorize" the city were actually pretty amazing — or would have been, if they'd ever done what they were supposed to do. Roxanne had never seen the guy up close, but after studying a lot of photos and news footage of the supposedly blue alien, she'd been sure she'd spotted a few flaws in his get-up that could indicate that he was nothing more than an over-the-top actor under a lot of prosthetics, make-up, weird-colored contacts, and flashy wanna-be Kiss-reject costumes. After all, if his skin really was blue, why was his tongue pink, like an ordinary human's? It just didn't make sense, unless it was all a put-on.

The one thing that made her question the validity of her deductions was how incredibly skinny the guy was. That was something that couldn't be faked, unlike bulky fat or muscle, which could. She'd seen severe anorexics with more flesh on their bones, and none of them had even a tiny fraction of the tremendous energy Megamind was always able to put into these so-called fights.

So Roxanne had done her research, asked questions, poked around City Hall for answers, and still wondered. While she was certain now that Metro Man was a genuine super, she couldn't help but think that maybe the Chamber of Commerce had cooked up "Megamind" for the express purpose of providing an appropriate villain to act as counterpoint to the hero, thus improving the show and attracting attention — and money — to the region. If life in Metro City had threatened to become too boring for Metro Man, he might well have talked about relocating to a more interesting city back east or out west, endangering the one claim to fame an on-the-skids Metro City had, so it would follow that the Powers That Be would find a reason for him to stay. The plan did seem to work. The locals and visitors loved rooting for their hero and booing his perennial enemy — literally _booing_ him, like an audience would hurl catcalls at the entrance of the smarmy villain in an old staged melodrama. And yet the blue guy never seemed bothered by it; she'd seen video footage of him, happily hurling boos and hisses back at the bystanders as if the louder their disapproval, the bigger his paycheck. For all she knew, that was precisely the case.

After a year of doing mostly second-hand research, Roxanne decided it was time to try a bit of first-hand work on her own. She'd approached her bosses with the idea of attempting an exposé on the supers in Metro City, to get to the absolute truth of the matter, but they weren't interested; some outright opposed it. If it turned out that even half of the super rivalry was part of a huge decade-long publicity stunt, they'd find themselves with a zero market share for being the killjoys who butchered the goose that laid the golden egg. And even if the conspiracy theory was totally disproved, they would still probably lose viewers, since a little bit of mystery was always a good thing; it kept people asking questions and coming back for more. Taking that away would get them labeled as party-poopers. Besides, her immediate superior pointed out, it was better for some people to think of this as a show without knowing any greater detail. It allowed them to believe the whole thing was an illusion solely for their entertainment, and not conclusive proof that there were aliens among us.

Roxanne wasn't thrilled with those answers, as she wasn't a person who considered herself uneasy with the notion that real aliens might be alive and living on Earth. She was about ninety percent convinced that it was a publicity stunt, anyway — and even if it wasn't, she needed to know the truth, if only to satisfy her burning curiosity. So she decided to do some freelance work, investigate things on her own dime and her own time, and keep the station out of it — for now. The only "involvement" she asked of them was the loan of one of the digital SLR cameras and a news quality telephoto lens. Since they'd recently upgraded the ones used by the true field crews, her boss was willing to let her borrow one of the older models, until an actual reporter needed it.

Before the onset of warmer weather in the spring, Roxanne made her plans. She'd already noticed that Megamind tended to be more active during the warmer times of year, no doubt because he wasn't an invulnerable super like Metro Man, merely a human actor or a very non-super alien (she was definitely leaning in the direction of the former) who felt winter's cold like any ordinary person. Since her purpose was to get as close as possible to the action and then use the powerful telephoto to get better shots than any she'd seen in print or on television — her goal being to capture hitherto unseen detail of these two in action, small details that could determine once and for all if this rivalry was staged or real — she had decided that her best bet would be to follow any battles that occurred in the mostly abandoned industrial sector and the equally abandoned docks and shipping facilities that had once served it. There, she wouldn't be hampered by traffic and the throngs of gawkers who inevitably came out to cheer on their beloved hero as he once again trounced the little blue twerp. Since these fights were generally quite visible from other parts of the city, people were perfectly happy to enjoy the show from a distance and leave the streets of Rustville and Gangland to the two- and four-legged vermin that hung out there.

This was perfect for Roxanne, as it gave her greater freedom of movement to find the perfect spot to train her lenses on the two so-called supers and catch their actions on digital film. It was also convenient that most of these larger than life brawls happened during the daytime — a non-coincidental coincidence if she'd ever heard one. She supposed that if Megamind's special effects equipment failed or the script called for him to be taken down in one of the more unsavory parts of that area, he didn't want to be caught there at night, when some of the _real _criminals crawled the streets, dealing drugs, having gang wars, and presenting life-threatening dangers he'd never dreamed of.

Over the next three months, she was presented with four opportunities that met her criteria. She missed out on the first as it had started while she was in the middle of a dull meeting at work and ended before said meeting was over. The second appeared to be a better chance; she'd spotted the start of the match while driving home from work, but between the evening rush traffic on the expressway and her unfamiliarity with the streets leading into Rustville, she got hopelessly lost and was ready with her camera only in time to catch Metro Man flying off with his foe, hauling his skinny butt back to prison. She couldn't even catch a decent shot of that, since it was nearly dark by the time she arrived.

After that, she made an effort to memorize the major streets that ran into and through her target area, which she should have done in the first place. She also got hold of a night lens that would let her snap pictures in extreme low light situations. By the third opportunity, she was ready, but the two supers were not. The battle had barely begun when something happened to stop it quite abruptly, the two foes retreating from the scene as if the director had yelled "Cut!" due to an equipment failure. She was more than half convinced that this was precisely the case.

The fourth opportunity — late on a hot afternoon in early July, July the Fourth in fact, what a surprise — wasn't perfect, but it provided her with a chance that looked like it just might hit the jackpot. Being in research rather than reporting, Roxanne actually had the day off (though given that it was a Sunday, she couldn't call her employers "generous," especially since they wanted her to work tomorrow, on the _real _paid holiday). She was suspicious that something might go down today, to entertain the locals and tourists with a patriotic display of their hero in action against his traditional nemesis. So she spent the day cruising the whole of the old industrial and wharf areas, just to see if she could catch any indications of the show to come.

She'd had a hunch that morning that today's entertainment might take place out on the peninsula, since that would give the best view to the people gathered in town for the holiday. It was a ratty, dismal, dirty part of the city, fully deserving of the description _abandoned, _but it was also completely devoid of life, save for the gulls, rats, and other critters that called it home. So much for _that_ idea. Rustville was always pretty inactive, and even Gangland was quiet, quite likely because the hoods were either at home, sleeping off the activities of the previous night, or were out mingling with ordinary citizens at the city's big celebration, picking pockets, dealing drugs, and in general taking advantage of the crowds to do their genuinely criminal business. Roxanne wasn't afraid of them, but having been a field reporter, she had the sense to steer clear of them rather than tempt fate.

By late afternoon, Roxanne was beginning to think that nothing would happen today, that either "Megamind" had another gig somewhere and wasn't available for a show today, or that if anything was planned, it was for tomorrow's "official observance" holiday, just to be a little bit unpredictable. She continued her prowl a while longer, until her stomach told her in no uncertain terms that it wanted food. She then took a side trip into the downtown, where she found a sandwich shop that had stayed open to catch people headed to the lakefront for tonight's fireworks display. While she ate her supper, she reviewed all that she knew about the nine-year-old history of open conflict between superhero and decidedly unsupervillain. There _was _something of a pattern to their fights, the places in which they tended to occur, the length of the intervals between them, the types of disturbances they usually caused. Really, even the most novice investigator should have caught on to the fact that for a supposedly "super" little war, nobody was ever caught in the crossfire, if such it could be called. If this _wasn't _a huge tourist attraction, why hadn't anyone ever been hurt, seriously hurt by it? What true villain worth his stripes would cause acts of mayhem and terror that never terrorized anyone? One big show, she was sure of it. And she was going to prove it, her boss be hanged.

About an hour before sunset, the traffic started to pick up, the fireworks crowd started to flood in to catch the evening's advertised extravaganza. Roxanne finished her second glass of iced tea, then left, hoping to get out on the road before the traffic became impossible. She was a bit late for that, and it took nearly the full hour before she was able to get off the surface streets of the city center. She started heading back to her apartment, taking the freeway spur that passed near the bankrupt industrial region — and it was there, as the last rays of the sun poured across the decrepit old buildings that she finally struck paydirt.

The expressway spur was in part a long bridge that carried traffic over the abandoned buildings below, allowing normal citizens to avoid seeing some of the worst evidence of the city's neglect. Many of the flat rooftops were visible, and on one of them, made noticeable mostly by the long shadows created by the near-setting sun, Roxanne spotted a familiar figure of blue and black. He was accompanied by a number of small, rather ugly-looking flying robots that were toting long wires in their also-ugly little pincers. To her eye, Megamind looked to be doing set-up work for a huge piece of demolitions work.

_Wow, _she thought as she headed for the nearest off-ramp. Was the guy actually planning something truly _villainous _for a change? Or had the writers for this particular script worked it out with the city to get both a spectacular show and a bit of urban renewal started with one fell swoop?

Excited, Roxanne took note of where the blue guy and his ugly robots (they really _were _ugly; she had to wonder if the designer had thought "evil" meant "crappy looking," or if they had been whipped together on a short deadline with an even shorter budget) were at work. By now, she was pretty familiar with the major buildings and streets through the area, so she didn't need to consult a map to know how to get there. Of course, she didn't plan to drive up to the old Edison Brothers Foundry, find a way up to the roof, and ask for a photo shoot. If the guy was already in full make-up and costume, he was probably working out some last minute details for the coming show. Roxanne seriously doubted that he was an actual demolitions expert; he'd likely been given instruction on how to set the final wires to the detonator, so that there'd be no chance of someone accidentally setting things off too soon.

As she neared the off-ramp, she slowed her car enough to get a good long look across the rooftops (too bad she couldn't pull over and start taking pictures; there was simply too much traffic). From what she was able to see, the wires were strung out for a block or two around the foundry building. There was an old abandoned tannery that she knew of outside the probable blast zone but with a clear, unobstructed view of her target. If luck was with her and the doors and windows weren't all boarded over, she could get up to the tannery roof and finally nail some decent pictures.

Her luck was holding, so far. Not only did she find an open door on her first try, but she also spotted a good place to hide her car, in an old loading dock area behind the building. She didn't think it would make much sense to be going after candid photos, only to give away her presence by parking right on the street. Yes, all her fine-honed reporter skills were clicking, bringing her closer and closer to a story that might very well be the start of a major career. Even if her bosses didn't want to use it, she would at least prove to them that as a trivia researcher, her reporting skills were being wasted.

She was so intent on making the most of this opportunity, she forgot that while the old foundry was in the area known as Rustville, the tannery was well into Gangland turf.

As dusk was falling outside, the inside of the grungy abandoned tannery was pretty dark. It took Roxanne a few precious minutes to find the staircase with the access ladder to the roof, but when she finally made it, she knew all the effort was worth it. Though the sun had just gone down, the sky was still quite bright, shining in gold and scarlet over the ocean-like vista of Lake Michigan. Against this flaming backdrop, she could get clear shots of Megamind at work, directing his flying uglybots in placing their web of wires and what certainly looked like explosives all across the tops of the buildings around the foundry.

While she snapped away, swapping the ordinary telephoto for the one with the night vision capabilities, it occurred to Roxanne that if demolition was the blue guy's intent, setting the charges on the roofs made no sense. Explosives were usually placed on support structures, from what she knew, and the only supports on the rooftops were those from long gone water towers and maybe the pseudo-villain's back brace. Wearing that huge head prosthetic had to wreak havoc with his sacroiliac. Well, maybe the urban renewal idea wasn't the plan, just some showy special effects blasts to make it look as if Rustville was about to be leveled.

The light was beginning to fade from the western sky when a wimpy little firework was shot off from one of the offshore barges, warning the audience that the show would begin in twenty minutes. A cackle of delight drifted across the roofs to Roxanne's ears, causing her to wonder if this Megamind guy thought something was funny, or if he was just warming up for the coming performance. Whatever the case, Roxanne was ready. She was going to get conclusive proof, once and for all.

She was not surprised, then, when just as Megamind hopped onto some odd sort of vaguely surfboard-like flying device and lifted up from the rooftop, a streak of white and gold appeared from somewhere in the east, the familiar figure of Metro Man showing up in time for the entertainment to commence. What surprised her was the fact that they didn't go right into the show. Instead, Metro Man flew up to the now airborne Megamind and stopped in front of him, hovering with arms crossed like a parent staring down a misbehaving child.

"Not this year, Megamind," she clearly heard him say in a stentorian baritone, even though there was no audience that he knew of to hear. "You promised you wouldn't interfere again with the city's patriotic fireworks display after last year's fiasco!"

She could hear the sneer in the villain's voice as she saw it on his face through her telephoto lens. God, the guy had his part down perfect, right to the mocking curl of the lip. He planted one fist on a skinny hip and waved his other hand in Metro Man's face. "I promised with my fingers crossed!" he taunted, and she could see that he was indeed doing just that with his black-gloved fingers. "Just like _you _did when you promised you wouldn't take me to prison on my birthday!"

"Justice doesn't cross its fingers — that was jail, not prison," the hero rejoined with impeccable logic. "And you didn't _tell _me it was your birthday!"

Roxanne would have to check her images later to see if Megamind really _did _stick out his tongue. "That's because it was none of your _beeznest!"_

"It's _business, _and I'm just about to put you out of it!"

"Oh, that _was _a snappy comeback, Mister Chairman of the Board! Tell me, _Waaaayyyyne, _does your entire family fortune come from hair care products? Are you the biggest stockholder or the biggest customer?"

Metro Man snorted and struck a pose, jutting out his considerable chin. "You're just jealous because evil _has _no hair and must stand naked before Justice!"

"And maybe _you're_ just jealous because _I _can do better things with my time than waste it standing in front of a mirror, pimping my hair!"

"It's _primping, _and good doesn't primp, it grooms to maintain a clean image!"

"Oh, la-di-da, I'm _so _humiliated! I just don't know _how _I find the time to think up clever banter for a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent!" While he'd been speaking, the blue villain had been slowly maneuvering his hover device so that he was now ringed by the flying uglybots.

The hero changed his own position but maintained his intimidating pose. "You're not going to get away with this!" he warned, not the greatest comeback, but at least to the point for a change.

"Just watch me!" came the gleeful retort as Megamind suddenly zipped off, a cloud of the little uglybots about him, his black cape billowing behind like a huge bat's wing. Roxanne wasn't sure where he was headed, but she suspected it had something to do with his plans for interfering with the lakefront festivities. He held up one hand, aiming a remote at something on one of the rooftops; it went flying a moment later when a quick zap of Metro Man's laser vision knocked it from his grasp and sent it spinning off into the night.

Annoyed by the loss of his control device, the blue guy yelled something she couldn't quite catch to the uglybots, half of which flew off in different directions while the others stayed with him as he went after the remote. Whatever the scattering bots were up to didn't appear to concern Metro Man, for no sooner had they taken off than he targeted his adversary's flying board with his laser vision. His first blast missed the villain as Megamind nimbly maneuvered to avoid it. It caught one of the uglybots instead, which dropped out of the fray like a whimpering dog; the rest of its little pack followed it out of the line of fire rather than stay in danger with their master. Roxanne swore she could hear Megamind shriek, "Cowards!" to their retreating tails, but he had more important things to deal with when Metro Man's next laser shot sliced the engine off his flyer.

While she snapped photos of the whole thing for posterity, Roxanne thought that this was the strangest "battle" she'd ever witnessed. It was more like a squabble between preteen schoolyard rivals. As Megamind and his flyer went spiraling out of control, down into the dark valleys of the streets below, the fireworks at the lakefront began — and a larger explosion on the opposite side of town momentarily lit the eastern sky. Metro Man had started to follow his foe, but the sight and sound of the explosion drew his attention elsewhere. Roxanne saw the uglybots return and close in around Megamind, saving him from becoming roadkill on the pavement. Metro Man saw it, too, then changed his mind about pursuing him and instead flew off in the direction of the explosion.

Was he just letting his opponent go? If he was, then that was all Roxanne needed to convince her that this was just a hoax. It was weird enough that Megamind had actually seemed to be enjoying himself, but this was the clincher. With his documented super speed, it would have been no problem for Metro Man to both nab the crook and go rescue the citizens; he'd done it before. There would be no reason to do otherwise now, Roxanne felt, unless he knew this whole business with "Megamind" was nothing more than a show that had to end early due to technical difficulties.

Well, maybe that _was_ a bit of a stretch, trying to make the facts fit the story rather than the reverse, but the reporter couldn't think of a better explanation for why a known hero would simply fly off and leave a presumably dangerous adversary. When Metro Man was gone and the fireworks display was rumbling and flashing and booming away, she decided to hustle back to the streets, to see if she could catch the fallen "villain" in the act of powering down the special effects and maybe even getting out of that hot and heavy prosthetic, not to mention the heavy make-up. On a sweltering night like this, she knew she wouldn't want keep either on a moment longer than was necessary to collect her pay. She'd noted the way his fall had taken him, and thought she might be able to get close to it if she hustled.

Fortunately, the other doors into the tannery building were only locked, not barred or boarded up, so she was able to take a different way out that would hopefully shorten the distance she needed to cover. She was glad that she'd worn her athletic shoes, so she could sprint in hopes of getting there before Megamind left.

She didn't realize that she'd gotten turned around inside the dark building until she was running down what she'd thought was the right street, heading in the right direction. There had been a pause in the fireworks when she'd left the tannery, probably while some ground display was lit up. When they resumed, they were, to her, in the wrong part of the sky. Frustrated, Roxanne realized that she'd been racing away from her quarry; she spun on her heel to head back again. Having been stuck in the office over the past year far more than she'd ever been on her last job, she was out of shape and getting disgustingly winded. Hoping to make things a little easier on herself, she began looking for a short cut. To her relief, she spotted a narrow alley that went in the direction she wanted, and hurried down it.

The alley seemed longer than any alley had a right to be. She was glad when it turned in what she felt was a convenient direction — until she went half a block farther, and suddenly found her path blocked by a tall chain link fence with an equally tall chained-shut gate. With the only light that from the distant fireworks and inevitable urban city glow, she hadn't seen it until she was almost upon it; though she tried to stop, she couldn't do so fast enough to keep herself from slamming into it. The impact knocked what little wind she had left right out of her, and left her clinging to the fence for support as she gasped, trying to get her breath back so she didn't collapse from lack of air.

"Great, just great!" she muttered to herself, annoyed by her own poor condition and the obstacle blocking her way. What idiot put a fence in an alley, anyway?

Roxanne kept filling her lungs, letting herself recover a bit while she considered her next step. She could go back the way she'd come, which was certainly the path of least resistance, but it would also take the longest, and she didn't know how much time she could afford to waste. She could try to climb over the fence, but between her winded condition and the weight of her camera equipment, she had her doubts that she'd succeed, except perhaps in breaking her neck or the expensive borrowed gadgets. Worse, she could see that the fence was part of what had been a secured yard of some sort, and even if she got over this obstacle, a second fence awaited not far beyond. She might find the strength to make it over one, but not two, not fast enough to make it worth the effort.

She was about to start back and was wondering how much longer she could manage to run before she collapsed like the last finisher in a double marathon when noises from around the corner of the alley behind her pushed other thoughts from her mind. The metallic grind and crash of an industrial garage door being opened was very loud, and was followed by the sounds of angry, garbled voices and heavy footsteps. There were also sounds disturbingly like that of flesh striking flesh, which suddenly caused Roxanne to wonder exactly where she'd wound up. The list of possibilities wasn't very long, and the flash from a particularly bright set of fireworks left no doubt when she saw the graffiti on the wall of the building to her right. She'd wandered into Gangland, in a dead end alley, after dark.

Damn.

She heard the noises of people coming her way, unfriendly noises no doubt caused by unfriendly people, and she immediately looked for a place to hide, knowing that running was not an option here. Fortunately, the alley was not empty. Though the wall to her right was solid brick, without so much as a door or a window, that on the left had several large dumpsters and assorted trash cans shoved up against it. The dumpsters were not empty, and there was no time to dig a space for herself inside one, even had she been so inclined. But there was a gap between two of the big metal bins, partially covered by one opened lid, and big enough for her to conceal herself in its shadows. It was her best option, and she took it. She dove into that gap and pulled herself into the cover of darkness just in time to avoid being seen by the group of hoods coming around the corner.

And she had no doubt that these were hoodlums, members of one of the nastier gangs, by their colors, a group known for drug dealing and even more unsavory activities. From her hiding place, Roxanne had a remarkably unimpeded view of them as they came to a stop.

There were seven in all, four of them large, burly men who well earned the description of "muscle." In pairs, they held captive two other men, who, by comparison, looked as skinny as Megamind. The seventh man had led them into the cul-de-sac, and in the eerie flashes of multi-colored light from the fireworks, his gaunt face made Roxanne recoil. She had seen pictures of people that reminded her of him — in slasher movies and in police sketches of criminals wanted for crimes that would make those cinematic villains seem like amateurs. It was the face of an insane mind, capable of all too reasoned but senseless acts to appease some unknowable inner need. It was the face of raw fear, and Roxanne had never thought to see it in the flesh, so close. Almost without thinking, she brought up her camera with the night lens, carefully setting it to silent operation so as not to draw attention to herself. In the long run, capturing this face and anything that might come next could be worth more to her career as an investigative reporter than any exposé involving fake superheroics.

"Over here," the gaunt man said brusquely, motioning for the thugs to hold their captives against the wall. A detached part of Roxanne's mind thought that professionally, this was perfect, as it gave her and her camera a clear view. The captives struggled as they were pinned against the wall, their curses giving way to pleading.

"Look, Blade, look, you—you don't have to do it! It's like we told your boss, it wasn't our fault this time! Dirk's girl found the money an' took it — go bleed it outta him, he's the one who let her keep it!"

"Yeah, Blade, th-that's th-the truth, I s-swear!" the second captive stammered, his eyes wild with fear. "Dirk's th-the guy you w-want!"

"Really," the gaunt man, Blade, said in a toneless voice that made Roxanne's blood run cold. "And how did Dirk's girl find it in the first place? That money and the goods should've been in Rock's hands three weeks before those two came back to town."

"We couldn't get it to him!" the first captive swore. "The narcs were watchin' us — if we'd made a move to deliver, they'd've nabbed us an' Rock an' all the rest of you, too!"

Blade made a casually disdainful sniff as he took something from his pocket, studying it as if it were vastly more interesting than anything they had to say. "Yes, we've all heard the story. So sad, so noble of you to protect us. And such bullshit. I don't think we need to hear it again." His narrowed eyes glanced at the thugs.

With obedient pleasure, they struck the captives to shut them up, first punching them in the gut to wind them, then clubbing their heads with solid, possibly weighted, fists until their victims were reduced to whimpers. "Not too hard, now," Blade admonished his cohorts with a chilling parody of concern. "This won't be any fun at all if they aren't awake to enjoy it."

The heavies seemed a little disappointed, but followed instructions. "Let's get this over with, Blade," one suggested. "The cops won't stay busy between that gas main explosion Rock set an' the lakefront mobs much longer."

One of the other thugs agreed. "I don't see why we just didn't take care of this inside," he said a little nervously, glancing skyward. "That Metro bastard could spot us out here..."

Blade waved it off. "Ah, that was the whole point of the explosion, to give our precious superhero some real threat to his beloved citizens to keep him occupied for a while." He spoke distractedly as he removed the sheath from what Roxanne could now see was a long, gleamingly sharp knife that looked like some kind of demonic surgical scalpel. "You know how Rock hates the smell of blood in his place, and we had to give him and the rest of the boys a few minutes to leave the area, just in case. But you're right, I think it's time to get down to business."

With that, the seemingly laconic man suddenly moved, turning to the more vocal of the two prisoners. With deft slashes almost too fast for the eye to follow, he sliced away the front of his victim's clothing, causing only the smallest of nicks to the man's skin. The captive screamed, the sound neatly covered by the thunder of the fireworks.

Though she couldn't see his face, Roxanne could hear the insane smile in Blade's voice. "Did you find that unpleasant, Billy? So sorry. Here, let's see how you enjoy this." And the gaunt man moved again, still with astonishing speed, this time using his knife with all the deadly skill of Jack the Ripper. Billy screamed, then fell silent with an awful, gurgling wail.

He worked so fast, Roxanne didn't have a chance to close her eyes against the horrifying sight. The shock of what she had just seen registered as the murdered man slumped in the grip of the thugs, who were trying to avoid getting soaked in his blood. Roxanne, frozen in shock, didn't hear Blade when he told the heavies, "Dispose of him." All she saw was the mutilated body being dragged in her direction. When it was hoisted up and heaved into one of the dumpsters beside her, her entire body shook from waves of terrified revulsion — and the camera slipped from her hands and fell clattering to the pavement.

Blade and the two thugs nearest her stiffened, hearing the metallic sound. "What's that?" the executioner snapped, rousing Roxanne, making her scrabble farther back into the shadows, hoping to become one of them, to escape this unexpected nightmare. One of the two heavies spotted the fallen camera. He jerked his head toward Roxanne's hiding place as he bent to pick it up, and his partner abruptly shouldered the dumpster aside, moving it far enough to reveal the hiding woman. He grabbed her roughly, hauling her to her feet as the other thug showed Blade the camera.

The killer saw what his henchman was pointing to, a _property of KMCP _tag glued to the camera. He smiled, horribly. "Ah, a newsie. Spying on our business, or just looking for a scoop, my dear?" he asked as she was pulled forward, now in the grip of the two who'd held the first victim. "Did you get a clear view of things, hm? Close enough to satisfy your curiosity? No? Then how lucky for you, you'll have a second chance to see anything you just missed."

His insanely smirking face suddenly went colder than the dead of space, his eyes as lifeless. "Hold her," he told the muscle restraining her, his voice causing the alley's sweltering heat to suddenly turn to arctic chill. "Make sure she doesn't miss a thing. I'm sure she'll enjoy knowing just what's in store for her — after she pays the price for intruding, of course."

The heavies dragged her forward, hardly noticing her best struggles. "You can't do this!" she began, and was promptly clubbed from behind, hard. Her vision swam and her head spun, the pain effectively silencing her. She thought for a moment that she might pass out, but the wave of aching dizziness passed much too quickly. The pain persuaded her against speaking again, for even the sound of her own breath was agonizing.

Blade motioned for the other two thugs to pin their captive against the brick wall. The man's struggles had dwindled to abject whimpers of begging, pleading, promising anything to avoid the fate of his friend. Roxanne was being held so that she could see absolutely everything. She didn't want to, and as she closed her eyes to shut it out, someone grabbed the hair above her forehead and yanked it and her skin back, hard, forcing her eyes to open.

Blade's eyes — not dark, no, but pale, too pale, like glass windows into a soulless void, empty of warmth or conscience — locked with hers, his expression the most unholy thing Roxanne would ever see. His lips twitched in a death rictus parody of a smile, and this time moving slowly, carefully, oh so precisely, he went to work, each grisly, deadly movement burned forever in the screaming recesses of Roxanne's mind.

_To be continued..._


	5. Chapter 5

V

Annoyed and disgusted, Megamind's booted feet finally returned to _terra firma, _thanks to the current crop of little prototype robot helpers he really wanted to call "brainbots," but stubbornly wouldn't until they developed a higher degree of artificial intelligence — not to mention some backbone.

"Stupid Metro Jerk," he muttered to himself, admittedly an unimaginative perjorative, but the best he could do with his hand stinging from the laser-eye burn and all his hard work trashed. He'd been working on his Anti-Independence Day Laser Light Show and Incendiary Display for three weeks, because despite what the twerp in white had to say about it, last year's show had been a spectacular success (except for that little problem with a couple of malfunctioning rockets, one of which flattened the S.S. Badger ferry docks in Ludington, while the other took a bite out of the old power plant smoke stacks across the lake in Port Washington). Every year, Metro Dweeb complained about his "interference," because every year, it was his parents or their company footing the bill for the city's show. But Megamind was privately convinced that the citizens actually found his display _much _more entertaining, but were afraid to say so because the Scotts had their sticky fingers in too many local pies.

Unlike the Scotts, he'd put a lot of time and effort in this particular presentation, and it was simply galling to have their baby boy come along and threaten to ruin it by sending the remote that would set it off flying somewhere into the dismal streets of Rustville. Really, it never occurred to Mr. Goody Two Shoes that these things were _expensive, _and not everyone could just walk into the bank and withdraw their own money. It never failed to annoy Megamind when he needed to resort to what looked like crime, simply to get his hands on what was truly, legally _his! _If he ever managed to take control of this city, one of the first items on his agenda would be collecting every last cent from the bank account that was his own and stuffing it into as many mattresses as were necessary.

After setting him down safely, the bots had withdrawn to a respectful distance, obviously terrified that their maker was going to use one of the few genuinely nasty settings of his de-gun on them for chickening out during the fight. Megamind huffed. "Oh, quit worrying," he scolded them as they were joined by the bots he'd sent off as useless decoys. "I'm not going to disassemble you." _Yet, _he added in his thoughts. Really, there were several modifications he could make to their circuitry and programming to improve their overall ability, and now that he was thinking along those lines, he'd decided something could also be done to improve their outer appearance as well. When he'd first come up with this metal-heavy design, he'd thought the grunge look would be quite villainously terrifying, but having had enough time to see them in action, he'd decided there was nothing aesthetically pleasing about the things, evil or not. They were just plain ugly, and that reflected poorly on his abilities as an engineer and a person with impeccable taste.

He sighed as he straightened his cape and kicked the downed flyer with disgust. Not that he was unfamiliar with the need to walk — or run — home from a battle gone wrong, but it was irritating to have to fold without even getting a chance to play his hand. He turned to the nervously waiting bots. "Well, if you want to make up for running out on me, haul this thing back to the Evil Lair so I can fix it. And no chewing!"

The bots seemed disappointed by that admonishment, but as the boss stepped away from the flyer, they moved in and gingerly started to collect all its broken bits and pieces. Megamind tapped a few controls on his multi-function watch to activate its simple homing device. He was really hoping to get its holographic disguise system working properly soon. While he had the system perfected for inanimate objects, when it came to living things, particularly people, it still had an annoying tendency to either fade in and out or to mix up random parts of different images, sometimes changing the selected image in disconcerting ways when it was supposed to be holding just one. That was a problem to be dealt with later, though his big brain never entirely let go of anything; it merely tucked everything away for proper consideration at a later time (or popped them out at strange moments in what to other people seemed like the most outrageous non-sequiturs). For now, he was hoping that he could pick up the signal he installed on all his remotes, since misplacing them was a common occurrence around Evil Lair, especially with bots that considered them chew toys. He did get a faint blip, but its direction was uncertain. Drat. Metro Boob had probably sent it halfway to Detroit, or had slagged it. He grumbled. One of these days, he was going to start submitting bills for damages to the over-muscled twit.

Grousing, he tapped another button. "Minion, where are you?"

The ever-cheerful voice of his henchfish came back immediately over the tiny speaker. "Right where I'm supposed to be, sir, waiting to pick you up at the corner of Michigan and Water. Is there a problem? I thought you'd planned to start things at 9:45. It's five after ten."

"I did, but Mr. Muscle Brain came along and sent the controls flying, and then took off again, probably saving some brats from singeing themselves with sparklers. I'm getting a faint signal from the remote, but I can't pin down the location. Can you triangulate?"

"No problem, sir! Just a second..."

Megamind tapped one foot impatiently while waiting for a response. He didn't care much for this part of town at night, not because he was afraid, but because he disliked all the various kinds of vermin that came out after dark. He'd managed to discourage the punks and hoods from hanging out on the peninsula where his most permanent Lair was situated, simply by arranging to have a few too many fights with Metro Man in that area. Keeping the hero from pegging the location of his primary hideout had been difficult, but it had been worth the risk to keep the true scum of the criminal world out of his neighborhood.

"Minion," he prompted when it seemed to be taking much too long.

"Sorry for the delay, sir," came the instant reply. "I was getting some interference from the emergency vehicles on the overpass. Did you know there was a huge gas main explosion on the east side of town?"

"It was a gas main? Yes, I heard an explosion off that way just before I crashed. That's why Wayne left, and I'm just willing to bet he'll try to pin the blame on me. Do you have the coordinates?"

"Yes, sir, they just came up. I've got a blip about half a block to the west of First and Pierce, to the south of the abandoned Falk Chemical factory."

Megamind immediately visualized the location. "That's about three blocks from here. If it's to the south, the remote probably landed in the old equipment storage yard. All right, Minion, I'll go get it and meet you at the southwest corner of Pierce. It shouldn't take more than five or ten minutes."

There was a slight pause before the fish replied. "Do you think that's a good idea, sir?" he asked, concerned. "That's in Gangland, on Rock Bradford's turf. Maybe you should send one of the bots to fetch it."

The blue alien snorted even as he started off in the proper direction. "After they turned tail on me in the middle of a fight? No, I'll go get it myself. Even if it's damaged and we can't use it to set off the display tonight, as long as it's not totally ruined we can still use the programming to set up another remote and give a surprise show tomorrow."

Minion was clearly resigned to the decision, knowing how difficult it could be to change his boss's mind once it was made up. "All right, sir, I'll be waiting for you. Just be careful. Those hoods haven't been very fond of you ever since you wouldn't let Bradford take over Backup Lair Number Eight on Lake Drive."

Megamind rolled his eyes in half-hearted exasperation. "I have my de-gun, I'll be fine. Really, Minion, you can be such an old mama fish, sometimes."

"It's part of my job, sir." That was what he always said when his ward complained about his protectiveness, and they both always accepted it as a permanent part of their friendship. It was a comfortable familiarity in an otherwise very uncomfortable world.

As he jogged toward the fenced-in equipment yard, the villain's footfalls made little more noise than those of a cat stalking its prey. Occasionally, Megamind enjoyed the threatening sounds the click of metal-tipped or hard leather soles could make, but when his work was sure to carry on into the night, he preferred the near silence he was able to achieve with softer soled boots, as the effect felt nicely evil (an oxymoron which he always ignored). He may not have been as disgustingly fast and strong as Metro Man, but he was definitely more nimble.

Extreme agility and quick reflexes were gifts of his alien species, ones that most residents of Metro City would not have believed Megamind could possibly possess. In the majority of the news videos that captured his battles with Metro Man, he came off as looking incredibly clumsy, but the truth was that if he hadn't been blessed with greater-than-human agility and reflexes, he couldn't have survived more than five minutes of his first real fight with Metro Man. Even with Wayne pulling his punches to avoid killing blows, Megamind needed every bit of his heightened nimbleness and speedy response time to evade immediate capture, and sometimes to avoid being hurt by the catastrophic failures of his own devices. His physical evasive maneuvers often looked absolutely graceless, strange contortions of massive awkwardness rather than the inhumanly possible escape efforts they truly were. That talent now allowed him to make his way quickly and quietly toward his goal, just as it allowed him to nimbly scale and vault over the ten-foot-high fence without so much as breaking his stride.

Without a sound, Megamind landed in the yard and checked the locator on his watch for the remote's position. He had taken no more than a single step toward it when a strong, bitterly metallic smell assailed his sensitive nose. He stopped, recognizing it at once. Blood. Human blood, and not a small amount of it, either. He remained absolutely still, well aware that motionless, his dark clothing would make him appear as nothing more than another shadow in the gloomy environs. The fireworks at the lakefront were still going on, but they were in another quiet part of the show, so their light and noise were minimal, for the moment. In that dark semi-quiet, he listened carefully, and his sharp ears caught voices, talking roughly.

"C'mon, Blade, you had your fun with Billy and Deke. Let us have a chance to have _our_ kinda fun with this snoop before you finish doing your thing."

Megamind recognized the name Blade immediately. He was an executioner in the employ of the gang boss Rock Bradford that Minion had mentioned. The alien had no love for Bradford or his gang, a pack of drug dealers, flesh peddlers, and other base criminal types who engaged in activities that the supervillain considered far beneath the dignity of any sane, intelligent villain. He had even less love for this Blade character, who took twisted pleasure from killing of the most brutal kind. He liked his victims to be alive through their gruesome slaughter, so that their last thoughts would be filled with the torment of every slice, with the image of his face and the knowledge of just who had killed them.

It was the sickest kind of power trip conceivable, and how anyone could do such things or even sanction them was impossible for the alien to imagine. One would have thought that having grown up in a prison, Megamind would be totally lacking in morals and ethics, but such was not the case. Contrary to conventional wisdom, some of Megamind's sensibilities about degrees of badness had been influenced in a strangely positive way by his prison uncles, to whom certain crimes were utterly unacceptable. Given that those who perpetrated such heinous acts were often ostracized — even killed — by other prisoners, avoiding them was just a matter of common sense survival to the inmates. To Megamind, who had also been influenced by the kindness of guards and even the warden, not to mention some of the more thought-provoking books he'd read while devouring the prison library as a youngster, certain acts struck him as demeaning, and others as barbaric. Murder was definitely one such act, and Blade's preferred methods went beyond mere barbarism.

Though his personal code definitely did not allow for killing fellow sapients — with the admittedly improbable exception of Metro Man — in Blade's case, Megamind felt that an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth would be a just fate, if the bastard had had enough eyes and teeth to even the score. He tried not to grind his own teeth in disgust at the stench of what had clearly happened just beyond the other side of the abandoned equipment yard. He again started to go after his remote and leave these savages to clean up their own mess when another of the hoods spoke up.

"Yeah, it's only fair, Blade. Me an' Zilch found her, we should get to have a little fun with the newsie bitch before you gut her."

_Her?_ Again, Megamind froze. It wasn't as if he hadn't heard plenty of stories about all manner of abuse of women during his time in prison; when he'd been a teenager, some of his more unpleasant "uncles" had seemed to view such tales as a kind of weird sex ed class. Being a villain, he felt it shouldn't have bothered him to hear such things, but it had. From their tone of voice, he knew just what kind of "fun" Blade's cohorts had in mind, and for reasons he couldn't have explained even to himself, it both disgusted and infuriated him.

"We shouldn't waste any more time, Roach," Blade was saying in his disturbingly unemotional way. "She stuck her nose into our business, she pays the price."

Another thug grunted. "Not just _your _price, Blade. You wasted too much time showin' off to her, slicin' up Deke. If you don't wanna hang around to finish her off, we will — when we're done with her."

Somehow, Megamind made a decision without consciously deciding. He snatched up the small remote, tucked it into a compartment on the back of his gunbelt, and ran toward the fence near the arguing hoods like liquid shadow flowing across the pavement. By the time he reached his goal, he'd achieved enough momentum to leap from the ground to a spot well up the side of the fence, getting just enough of a grip on the metal links to flip himself even higher so that he landed lightly on the metal bar atop it. The move made only the smallest of sounds; Blade and two of the thugs heard it, but looked across the closed yard to see where the noise had come from. The villain smiled to himself, a little smugly. Once in a while, it felt good to know that Wayne Scott wasn't the only person whose alien origins gave him certain extraordinary physical advantages.

"Well, well," he said casually, leaning against the wall of the building on his left and effectively gaining the hoods' startled attention. "If it isn't a few of the Rustville Rejects, out polluting the night air with their usual skunky stench. I won't say it's nice to see all of you again, because it isn't — especially _you, _Blade. I thought Metro Jerk hauled your slimy butt to prison at least six months ago. Did you actually manage to slither out under a door when their backs were turned?"

Blade made a strange sound like fingernails on a blackboard, a scraping, grating noise that passed for his laughter. "Ah, and if it isn't Megaloser. Never figured out how to _avoid _being thrown into the slammer, did you?"

The alien shrugged quite nonchalantly, though his eyes were quickly scanning things below him, gathering vital information. On the opposite side of the alley, he could see the grisly evidence of the hoods' recent "games" in the dumpsters, only slightly more gruesome than the overpowering stench of the blood that covered much more of the scene. He could see that two of the heavies were holding onto a woman, streaked and spattered with blood from the victim of the previous murder she'd had "shown off" to her, Blade's typical promise of things to come. Her weak movements told him that she was still alive, but her clothing — definitely not that of any gang member or streetwalker — bore all the signs that Blade had taken his usual first step in preparing his victims for execution. That, no doubt, had started the argument from the other thugs, who wanted to further abuse her before allowing Blade to go about his sadistic, deadly work. If the position of their hands on her body were any indication, they'd already started to do things their way, whether Blade liked it or not.

Even though he was a self-proclaimed villain and proud of it, the whole situation and the sight of the poor woman being handled like a slab of meat made something inside Megamind clench like a fist. It was difficult for him to maintain his air of indifference as he spoke. "Why bother when you can leave whenever you want? At least when you're in, someone else is paying the bills and taking care of the house. So, what brings you rats out on a night like this? Getting a little crowded down in the sewers?"

One of the thugs growled. "It's none of your business, ya little blue shit. Get off our turf before we do somethin' you'll regret."

The green eyes narrowed, more dangerously than the hoods were able to perceive. Though he enjoyed the challenge of the extemporaneous aspects in his running battles with Metro Man, Megamind was a planner by nature, and even some of his most absurd efforts were made only after his hyperdriven mind had assessed the situation and come up with at least a dozen possible responses to it. "Oooh, an attempt at a clever comeback! I'd think you were actually beginning to develop a brain, Dice, if I couldn't see that you're all still just a bunch of mindless slugs."

One of the other punks snarled. "Come on down, buttwipe, an' we'll show you all about _slugs." _ He smacked one meaty fist into his other palm in demonstration.

The alien's bright eyes glittered with more than a reflection of the light from a distant firework. The fingertips of one gloved hand danced along the handle of the de-gun, too subtly for the hoods to notice. "Is that actually a threat, Marv?" he asked mildly.

Marv's laughter was ugly. "No, Megajerk, that's a promise."

The others joined in the laughter. The two manhandling the woman let her fall to the pavement like a discarded doll. She barely moved, further evidence of their abuse, which made Megamind all the more angry. "Yeah, c'mon down you skinny little wimp," the punk called Zilch taunted. "We'll show you how real _men _fight!"

Megamind pushed away from the wall and looked down at the thugs with an odd smirk. "Real _men,_ is it? That sounds... interesting." The four heavies grinned back, like a wild dog pack anticipating the kill.

Before they could do more than that, the slender alien leapt down from the fence, one booted foot snapping out to jab his heel into Zilch's forehead with such unexpected force, the thug's entire body flew back and slammed into one of the dumpsters head first, the impact causing a satisfying ring of bone against metal before he slumped down to the pavement, unconscious.

Marv made a lunge for the small villain, which Megamind neatly avoided; his motion brought the back of one spike-covered forearm slamming hard into Dice's groin as the punk tried to grab the alien from behind. When the howling heavy started to double over in pain, Megamind sent him to join Zilch, first with an elbow smash to the face that made him stagger back with a broken nose, followed by spinning blow of one spiked boot to the back of both knees that caused the hood to crumple and crash face-first to the ground. "Never mess with someone who grew up learning how to fight in a prison," he told the fallen Dice as he turned to face the other two.

Given how this "skinny little wimp" had just managed to take out two muscular men easily twice his size in extremely short order and didn't appear the least bit winded by the effort, the remaining thugs held back, trying to figure out what he'd do next. "Shit," Roach swore, angry at how they'd been caught unawares by the alien's surprisingly effective streetfighting skills. "If you can fight like this, why the hell _don't_ you?"

Megamind grinned as the whiner lunged at him. "Just because I _don't_ doesn't mean I _can't."_ Using Roach's own charge against him, he pulled the man even farther forward to bring the entire force of the attack crashing straight into an upraised knee aimed right at his temple; he then slammed down both elbows on the back of the hood's unprotected neck. "Besides, unlike you, _I _have style!" he added, gladly knocking Roach senseless as well.

He turned to Marv, inviting him to bring it on with a gesture and a wicked smile. Marv sized up his wiry little opponent with a streetfighter's eye — then decided to exercise the better part of valor and ran. He didn't make it more than five steps before Megamind chose to end this charade in a more civilized fashion, using the de-gun on its Death Ray setting to bring him down. Marv fell as if he had been turned to stone, not dead, but in a state that would simulate it quite effectively for next hour or two. Megamind usually thought of it as a flaw in the device, but the truth was that he just wasn't a killer at heart, especially not of ordinary, non-invulnerable humans.

When he turned his attention to Blade, however, he was ready to make an exception for such inhuman scum. During the alien's brief fight with his four henchmen, the executioner had slithered over to the discarded newswoman and hauled her up to use her as a shield. Her resistance was weak, telling him that he'd let Zilch and Roach rough her up a bit too much to hold the struggling bitch still while he'd "prepared her" for his form of entertainment. It was in hindsight a step he should have avoided, since it was the sight of exposed female flesh that had started the argument which had left enough time for this unfortunate interruption to occur. No matter, though. He could make use of her in his own way now, before slicing her into permanent silence with a single stroke. Holding her before him with one arm, his other hand pressed the edge of his knife to her throat as he carefully inched away toward the alley's exit, smiling at Megamind in snide triumph.

"Do you know what your problem is, Megamind?" he said, sneering at the small alien whose intense green eyes were watching him carefully. "Why after all these years, you just keep on losing and losing and losing? You, my blue friend, have a nasty little handicap called _morals. _ If you want to do us all a favor and actually rid this world of Metro Man, if you want to be a _real_ success like me, then morals are a luxury you can't afford. It's much easier to do whatever needs to be done in this world if you don't give a damn about anyone but yourself."

The edge to Blade's voice was as cold and soulless as the edge of his knife; it was feral, bestial, like the grating metallic sound of his mocking laughter. He began to move away, still holding his weapon to the woman's throat.

Something — Blade's words, his laugh, his revolting, inhuman _cowardice, _using a woman he intended to kill just to protect his loathsome hide _—_ pricked Megamind's anger in a way nothing else could. He had occasionally used women as bait in his conflicts with Metro Man; he had tried to frighten them so that his adversary would take his threat seriously and engage in their ongoing Game, but _never _would he have actually harmed them, nor could he have even thought to lower himself to the level of slime that would use them as a living shield. Seeing this unfeeling _creature_ doing what was beneath even a supervillain made something within that villain snap.

Driven by a wave of intense fury that was also supreme righteous indignation, he moved, so fast that he surprised even himself. His fist lashed out and struck the killer's jaw so precisely and with such force, he could feel the bone crack under his knuckles before Blade staggered back, a primal attack that was nonetheless immensely satisfying in its raw simplicity. Blade bellowed in pain and frustration as the blow also caused his hands to spasm open and sent his knife flying from his grasp, skittering across the bloodied alley.

"Then I'm glad I'm _not_ like you — _friend,"_ Megamind answered more earnestly than he'd expected. For the first time in his life, he honestly wished that he could pick up that lost knife and use it to finish the job on its owner. Instead, still acting purely on instinct, he somehow managed to catch the woman with his left arm as the staggering killer released her, even as he brought up the heavily spiked shin guard of his right boot between Blade's legs, hitting hard in the madman's most sensitive spot. Blade screamed as the sharp metal struck home, perhaps the most human action of which the psychopath was capable. Megamind then drew the de-gun with his free hand and gladly sent Blade off to join Marv in simulated death. It was the best he could do to satisfy his enraged desire to see this inhuman bastard dead.

For good measure, he used the same setting and fired on the three unconscious thugs, to make sure they didn't come around and cause more trouble, not until he'd figured out all that had just happened, all that he'd just done.

He didn't know why, but now that the fight was over, Megamind found that he was shaking, more than he ever had during or after a fight with Metro Man — and almost as much as the poor woman he only then realized was still in his arms.

_To be continued..._

_

* * *

_

To all my reviewers: Thank you kindly for your wonderful comments. Hope I didn't keep you waiting too long!

And for those who have expressed some confusion about the timing: It is said in the film that the conflict between Megamind and Metro Man has been going on for twenty years; given that Metro Man is starting to go gray and is definitely having a mid-life crisis when he decides to retire, the twenty year public conflict as superhero and supervillain probably started somewhere in their teens. For the purpose of my stories, the presumption is that they are in their mid to late thirties at the time of the film, Roxanne perhaps a bit younger (after all, it does take time to become a star reporter in a large market). As this part of the story takes place eleven years before events of the movie, they are all in their early to mid twenties. I hope that makes things a bit clearer. :)


	6. Chapter 6

VI

"Are you hurt? I mean, of course you're hurt, but do you have any injuries? Were you hit? Can you understand me?"

Roxanne didn't recognize the voice — or she thought she _should _recognize it, but couldn't understand why. The last thing she remembered was being hit, more than once, with somebody snarling, "Hold her still, damn it!" in the coldest voice she had ever heard. Was this that same voice? No, it was different, it wasn't snarling, it wasn't cold, it sounded... concerned. Was it from before that, before she was hit? Her unfocused mind wandered back, back to before, back to — _no, don't think about it, don't remember, don't..._

She tried to shake her head, to make the horrifying images go away, but the stabbing pain in her head and shoulders only intensified, making the entire world tilt and spin in a sick, gut-wrenching way. A strange sound reached her ears, and something told her it was a sound escaping her own throat, a thin and pitiful whine.

"No, don't!" the strange but not-strange voice said, almost pleaded. "Try not to move, you'll only make it worse. Can you hear me?"

Who was talking to her? Where was she? The questions bounced around her brain like... like... _no, don't remember, push it away..._

Something touched the back of her head, and a thin whine again escaped her. "I won't hurt you, I promise," the voice said, and this time she heard an odd underlying quaver, as if the speaker was... frightened. Why would — _they _be frightened?

Though she had been terrified to open her eyes again after being let go by the hood who had forced her to watch Blade at work — _moving slowly, so slowly, __too__ slowly, please stop, don't do it, don't say it, don't say I'm next — _Roxanne was stubborn, sometimes too stubborn for her own good. If she didn't open her eyes again, she might _never _open her eyes again, she would let them win, _don't let them win...!_

She was trembling despite the heat when she felt the touch again, at the back of her head — _don't touch me, damn you, DON'T TOUCH ME! _She flinched, and for a moment the touch disappeared, but it came back a second later...

And it was gentle, not a fist but just fingers, warm, soft fingers — and they were trembling.

Trembling?

Even in her delirium, that observation touched Roxanne's natural curiosity, giving her something to focus upon that wasn't part of her living nightmare. Though the hurt within her shouted _don't look, don't open your eyes, don't ever be curious again! _her inquisitiveness was something her stubborn core would not relinquish. It was what _they_ wanted, and she never gave up without a fight.

The trembling fingers didn't hurt; there was something about the careful way they moved that felt weirdly familiar, like... someone, someone who took care of her. She couldn't remember — so she opened her eyes.

They felt gritty and didn't want to work at first; her eyelids felt like they had been glued shut. She blinked several times, then finally managed to keep them open. It was night, and the world seemed blurry and flickering, the light flashing then fading, but she could see eyes looking back at her. She flinched again, remembering Blade's cold, colorless eyes — _don't! _— yet these weren't the same. They weren't cold; they were worried, and they were anything but colorless.

Green. Roxanne had never seen eyes so _green. _Did anyone really have eyes that color?

"Good, you're awake," the not-strange not-familiar voice said, almost a sigh of relief. Did the voice belong to the eyes? She couldn't make herself look at anything but the eyes yet, afraid that if she dared to look away she would see—

_Blood, oh, God, how could one person have so much blood?_

The eyes suddenly looked even more worried — _Did they see my thoughts? Do they know?_

"I won't hurt you," the voice said again. "I promise. I'm pretty sure you have a bad concussion, but I can't tell if it's worse than that. Here."

The touch was gone now, and she heard a soft rustle, a silky sound, like the voice. Something was wrapped around her, something heavy that was also silky, and warm. Was she cold? Yes, she felt cold — but wasn't it hot? The strangeness of those conflicting thoughts made her look down, to see what this silky thing was. It felt nice, so nice, after... after the other touchings...

She shuddered, again pushing away the awful memory. Her eyes saw something blue. Not the silky thing, but something holding it, wrapping it around her. It was... a hand? _Hands had hurt her, hands had... __touched__ her... _

But this one wasn't touching, just moving something that wasn't hers. Was it wearing a blue glove? Who wore gloves in summer? The hand shifted and was joined by another as they finished wrapping her in the silk. The second hand was black, jet black, like the silk, but not silk. Did any people have jet black skin? No, wait, it wasn't skin — not human skin, anyway. The black was a leather glove with silver studs on its back, glinting in the funny flashes of light. _Is there a thunderstorm coming?_

"We need to get you to a hospital," the voice said again. "I know they hit you, but did Blade... did he cut you?"

The name and the word _cut _made Roxanne flinch again, terrified. Her eyes snapped up, saw the green ones, and suddenly focused on the face surrounding them. It was blue, like the hand; its expression was one of deep anger, everywhere — except the eyes. The eyes were worried, nervous, unexpectedly kind. She could see him swallow, something about the movement of his long slender neck bizarrely extraordinary. The skin, it had to be the skin, it looked so strange, not possible yet so...

"...real," she said, her voice a croaking whisper. It looked so real, but it couldn't be, could it?

"What?" There was a world of confusion in that single syllable.

Roxanne, staring at the blue skin, saw the mouth move to form the word though she didn't hear it. She managed to move then, just enough to get one hand out from under the silkiness wrapped around her to touch the face in front of her. She rubbed her fingertips against the skin, felt the soft smoothness of it, then turned her hand to stare stupidly at her fingertips. No trace of the color had rubbed off on them.

"Real," she said again, her shock-numbed mind fixing on this one thing, which was something she'd been studying, something safe and familiar, not threatening, not promising her pain then—

Her eyes snapped up again as her mind refused to complete the thought. She focused on the green eyes again, another safe spot. They were such a vivid, beautiful color, like the green of cool grass on a hot day, but not falsely uniform in tone, as one would see with colored contacts this bright. And they were too big, too round, too... something. She couldn't think of what. He had no hair on his surprisingly young face and head other than expressive black eyebrows and the kind of dark lashes only men were lucky enough to have, which women usually envied. She again looked at her fingers, then back at the blue face. The flaws she'd thought she'd detected in news footage and clippings weren't there. "It's real," she murmured, staring at the much larger than normal head. "You're real. Not a fake."

A peculiarly crooked smile crossed the face, a shockingly normal, _human _reaction. "Some people would beg to differ," he quipped, seemingly amused by her fascination and her attitude. "But yes, I'm real. Do you know who I am?"

She blinked stupidly, trying to remember through the waves of dizziness and nausea. "Alien," she whispered, able to deduce that much. "Meh—Meh-something'. 'S not an act..."

Said alien suddenly understood; he even chuckled, but kindly. "Oh, you're one of _those, _another reporter who thinks I'm a figment of the Convention and Tourist Bureau's warped imagination. I assure you, miss, I'm not. But I don't think this is the time to provide you with _conclu-see-ive _proof." Some weirdly functioning part of Roxanne's brain wondered at his odd pronunciation of _conclusive._ His smile faded, brow furrowing, and that same something sputtering along in her head was perplexed. Could a villain actually _care _about a total stranger? "Those punks beat you up, didn't they?" he asked, his hesitant, still trembling fingers touching the many injured spots on her face so lightly, they tickled like feathers, causing no hurt at all.

The utterance of the word_ beat _derailed her shaky toy train of thought as the memories came charging back like a full-sized high-powered freight train running at top speed. She gasped and pulled away, shivering at the images in her brain that were almost as bad as the actual events. "They— they made me watch," she choked out, the horror like a strangle hold on her throat, her fixed stare at the huge green eyes glassy but unwavering, her only lifeline to sanity. "He c-cut him, took him a-apart, made him scream, b-but he d-didn't stop, jus' said I was next, cut my clothes an' told me — told me..." Her unfocused eyes widened, seeing the bloodied knife pressing against her skin, moving...

The horror in her eyes and in the whisper that was her voice brought the rage boiling back to the alien's face; he looked away, teeth clenched. "Monsters!" he snarled with pure hatred for the bastards who had bathed this alley in blood. "Savage, brainless, inhuman _monsters...!"_

Roxanne recoiled at the ferocity of his words; her sounds of distress made the alien instantly apologetic. "Sorry, I'm sorry!" he said, the worst of his fury suddenly gone, replaced by a strange fear, for her. "I didn't mean to frighten you! I won't hurt you, I promise, I won't _ever_ hurt you! It's just..." He bit his lip, and she could see the tip of his incongruously pink tongue against the genuine blue of his lip. "I'm supposed to be the villain, the obvious alien, and people call _me _a monster — yet humans do things to each other every day that are far more monstrous than anything _I _dream of! But you don't need to hear that, do you?"

She relaxed a bit at the way his voice softened. It was all so strange. Was she even awake? Could this be some bizarre nightmare? But the awful memories were still there, lurking very nearby, waiting to pounce if she let down her guard for even a second, like demons hovering just outside the firelight on a cold, haunted night. She shuddered, and was suddenly gripped by a tremendous wave of nausea. She couldn't stop it, her stomach full of agony and revulsion was trying to escape through her mouth, trying to purge her body of the poisons of pain and memory — _oh God...!_

Everything went black as she spasmed, retching up what was in her like the black bile of those awful, awful thoughts. When the nausea retreated, she muzzily wondered if she'd just vomited on her rescuer, that would be so incredibly _rude_ — but no, he'd shifted position and was now holding her in a way that allowed her to purge herself onto the pavement, but at the same time cradled her to keep the paroxysms from jerking her head and causing her more pain. It seemed that he was all too familiar with her condition and knew exactly what to do to make things easier for the victim.

Finally, the spasms stopped, and her head was spinning out of control. Though she was still bundled up in the silky cloth, she was bent forward across one of the alien's thin arms. She could feel the other hand supporting the back of her head, preventing her from causing herself more harm by moving it too suddenly, but at the same time cradling it as gently as a fragile eggshell.

Exhausted from vomiting, her right side leaned against him, appreciating both the support and the warmth. Something, she didn't know what, told her that she was safe now, that she was being protected. Another small voice warned that she shouldn't feel this way, that she _wasn't _safe, not at all, not with an alien villain who really _was _an alien — but she made it shut up. Even if it was a lie, she _needed _to feel safe, and he'd _promised_ he wouldn't hurt her, not ever. She believed him. She wanted to believe him — she _had _to believe him. A real villain wouldn't care, yet he did. He hadn't frightened her; he hadn't even tried. She'd been pretty much out of it, granted, but she'd seen and heard enough of what had happened before he'd caught her to know that he had made the horror _stop._

It was all the reasoning Roxanne could manage. Desperate in her need to shut out the terrifying sights and smells filling the alley, she turned her face toward him — was he wearing leather? If so, it was soft, the softest leather she'd ever felt. She leaned into him and let go, sobbing until all she could smell was the salt of her tears, the scent of well-made leather, and the faint, sweet fragrance of mint.

* * *

This was most definitely a new and vaguely disconcerting experience for Megamind, for several reasons. For one, the last time he'd been this close to a female had been when he was six, and Jenny Osgood had tried to take chunks out of his forearm with her sharp little teeth during his abortive attempt to attend a normal school. For another, though he was used to tending injuries, few had ever been this severe, and all had been his own, treated with the help of Minion. Oh, he knew how to tell what was wrong and what to do about it, but it felt very, very strange to be the one administering aid, especially after being the one to take down the attackers. It felt peculiarly... _good, _and all his years of struggling to attain supervillain status screamed that this was just _wrong. _But...well. He'd gone and done it because Blade and the other punks _deserved _it, and worse. That had also felt good, showing them that he was not the seventy-eight pound weakling that he appeared to be, and he was more comfortable accepting that justification for his decidedly non-villainous actions. Saving this girl — that had been an unavoidable side-effect. Right. Excellent cover, he'd stick with it.

Of course, his excuse didn't quite account for his earnest promises not to harm her, but... well, he may have been a villain, but he was also a gentleman. Behaving like a cad under the circumstances just wasn't done. There was no need to be uncivilized about it, after all, which was also why he'd wrapped her in his cape. Common courtesy, another superb excuse.

And the circumstances _were _horrifying. Megamind knew far too much about Blade for his own comfort, about the things that were capable of putting a smile on the executioner's face. He enjoyed his job, and enjoyed finding new horizons of pure sadism to cross, just to make his victims' ends that much more gruesome, and to strike fear into the hearts of any who dared to cross his path. Megamind wasn't afraid of Blade — he was far from the first psychopathic killer the alien had ever met — but he felt deep down that the world would be a far better place without him, a rather surprising attitude from someone who had become a villain largely because of all the cruelty that same world had shown him. But because of that, he also knew how it felt to be the helpless victim of others who wielded unearned and undeserved power. He seldom did anything to actively oppose the criminal scum that infested parts of Metro City, but by and large, he detested it.

As the woman cried herself out against him, clearly venting the hysteria of what had been done to her, he felt a jumble of emotions. The first was shock, as he'd never been touched by any human who had turned to him for protection, much less a female. Granted, he'd put himself in this position by being foolish enough to get involved, but now that he was here, he would just have to make the best of it. It felt vaguely nice, in a way he hadn't really experienced since he'd been a boy and had needed to protect Minion from his cruel classmates.

Of course, Megamind told himself with a mental slap in the face, there was no question about making a regular habit of this kind of thing; it would simply ruin his reputation as a villain and destroy his path of destiny. Blade and his cohorts weren't capable of causing any trouble for the moment, but he would need to do something to make sure they didn't cause trouble later. Somehow, he needed to be sure that they were taken out of circulation, hopefully for the remainder of their unnatural lives.

But he couldn't very well hand them over to the authorities. That kind of thing would not only ruin his standing as a supervillain, it would also make him a target for the Bradford Gang, and most likely every other gang in Metro City that hired slime like Blade. If these five thugs merely claimed that he had attacked them, he knew very well that few would believe them, as he had carefully allowed the otherwise unflattering belief that he was a weak and ineffective fighter to flourish. If it was widely accepted that he was no threat in such ways, the few times he needed to resort to pure physicality would be dismissed as excuses made by people who needed to push the blame for their own failure onto someone else. Ordinarily, he despised being made a scapegoat, but in this case, it was simply a matter of personal protection.

And there was also this woman to consider. Megamind had little use for the investigative reporters who tried to stick their noses into his business for their own gain; to him, the media was a tool to be used for his own purposes, at _his_ discretion, not theirs. But that didn't mean they deserved to be slaughtered, even though there had been a few times when he'd entertained notions of doing away with particularly pesky reporters who had reveled in publicly humiliating him. He never _would, _but thinking of inventive ways to disintegrate them helped to take away some of the sting necessity inflicted on his pride.

Besides, even if she _was _one of _those _reporters, he felt she'd already paid the price for her nosiness, and more. Getting caught by Blade and being forced to witness his "techniques" in action, knowing that you were next in line for slaughter was an experience he wished on no one, not even Wayne. He wanted his old rival out of his life, but he would consign no one to the Complete Tour of Hell that was Blade's specialty. Especially not a young woman whom Blade had already dragged through the first three or four levels.

It occurred to Megamind that he was merely presuming that she was a _young _woman because of the thugs' sexual interest in her. Though he found the very idea of rape and molestation revolting, he knew that many hoods had no qualms about forcing themselves on women, regardless of their age or appearance. If they were in the wrong place at the right time, any woman or even girl was considered fair game.

Shuddering away some of that disgust (and, thankfully, finding that his own adrenaline shakes were finally abating), the alien bent his head to try to get a better look at the woman's face. It was impossible for the moment, as she had it pressed against his chest and he didn't have the heart to force her to move. When he'd been checking her eyes for signs of severe head trauma and had examined her face to see if any other serious damage had been inflicted, it had been a bit difficult to see beyond the bruises and swelling and streaks of blood — little of which appeared to be her own, thankfully, though that opened whole new areas of revulsion and mental cruelty. From what he had been able to discern, she was perhaps a few years younger than himself, and he supposed that without the marks of brutality, she might have been considered reasonably attractive. It was hard to tell for sure, given this light and her current condition, and it was really beside the point.

He lifted his head and looked around then, ignoring the "dead" thugs and the remains of their victims. He made a habit of getting to know the names and faces of all the local reporters so that he could either avoid them or use them as a means to spread his own news when he wished. He didn't recognize this woman at all, and in his admittedly very cursory glance at her too-exposed body, he hadn't seen anything on her tattered clothing to identify her as a newsie, as the hoods had called her. Either she was a very new face that they knew and he didn't — a situation he found annoyingly intolerable — or something else had tipped them off. Perhaps...

Carefully removing his left hand where it was poised at the woman's back in case she started to vomit again, he lifted his watch to his face, nudging the communicator to life with the tip of his nose. "Minion," he said quietly, "I'm at the east end of the alley outside of Falk's equipment yard. I need you to come and check something out for me."

He could hear Minion's concerned expression. "Is everything all right, sir?"

Megamind couldn't help but smile a little at his guardian's predictable response. "I'm fine, but I had a bit of an encounter with some of Bradford's hired muscle."

He could hear the fish's gasp over the sound of an accelerating engine. "Not Blade?" Minion plainly hoped for a negative answer.

The villain didn't hate to disappoint him. "Yes, but don't worry, he's been... neutralized. I'll explain everything later. But I should warn you, Minion, I didn't arrive soon enough to interrupt all of his usual activities."

"I understand, sir," came the grim reply. "I'm on my way."

When Minion arrived, the car parked just outside the alley to facilitate a fast getaway if such was needed, his robotic footsteps echoed around the bend in the alley as he approached. Megamind was glad he'd thought to warn him that Blade had been at work here. A basically gentle-hearted creature, the alien piscine was even more disgusted by the human capacity for senseless barbarism than his master. While he ordinarily thought of gang-on-gang violence as a form of natural selection that kept the predators from growing too numerous, Minion didn't like seeing the results of that violence, especially not first-hand. When he came around the corner, the robotic suit stopped as its inhabitant assessed the scene, determining where he needed to go and what he needed to avoid. Megamind saw this, and called to him, not loudly.

"It's all right, Minion, most of them are still alive, just de-gunned. Just steer clear of the dumpsters and you should be all right."

Minion nodded, but nonetheless stepped cautiously as he drew near. "How long do we have until they come around?" he wondered. "I didn't pick up any other signs of activity on my way here."

The blue alien felt himself relax just a tiny bit. "Good, that means Bradford and the rest of his scum wanted to be out of here before Blade went to work. These goons should be out for at least another full hour. I need you to see if you can spot something over there." He nodded toward the fence, at the shadows of smaller trash cans clustered between the dumpsters and the wall of chain link.

"Of course, sir — but who's that?" Minion bent down slightly, curious as to who was leaning against his boss, wrapped in the boss's cape.

"One of Blade's almost-victims, not a gang member, if that's what you're wondering. When I arrived, they were about to—" The large head shook, dismissing the matter for the time being. "I'll explain later. They said she's a reporter, but I don't recognize her. They roughed her up pretty badly, and I wanted to see if there was anything around that might tell us who she is. I can't very well take her to a hospital, but I thought if we had something to go on — a name, an address, a phone number — we could leave some anonymous tip for them to come get her."

"I suppose that could work," Minion agreed even as he moved in the direction Megamind had indicated. "But if she's in bad shape, that might not be the best idea. She could... well, die before help arrived."

"I know, but it's not like we have a cell phone handy to call 911, either. I was thinking that _she _might, if she's really a reporter."

"Hmm, that's true. Did you check her pockets?"

Megamind was glad Minion was looking away and the light was sporadic at best, because he could feel himself blushing furiously. "Ah — no. I, uh, suppose I should." _Where does women's clothing __have__ pockets?_ he wondered. He really didn't want to just feel around aimlessly, especially not knowing what he did about the state of her clothing and what the heavies had been doing to her. He looked down, and saw that she had shifted her head, enough to look up at him.

A distant flash from the fireworks display gleamed in her pain-fogged eyes, which he only then noticed were a clear blue. "No phone," she whispered, letting her head sag again.

The blue alien was relieved. "She says she doesn't have a phone, Minion," he called to the fish.

"That's too bad," came the disappointed reply, which brightened a moment later. "Is she awake, sir? That's good, if she has a concussion."

"I know. She's been conscious, but not very lucid."

"Have you asked her name?"

From the way she suddenly stiffened and seem to shrink into herself, Megamind could tell that she'd heard the question, and for some reason was afraid to answer it. He wasn't sure if she was afraid to tell him, or if she feared someone else hearing it — like one of the not-dead thugs. He decided there would be no harm in indulging her.

"No, but I don't think she's in any shape to answer questions, just yet," he fibbed, only slightly. Considering his own experiences with milder concussions, it was very likely the truth, anyway. "Have you found anything? I thought I saw something over there, though it might've just been a piece of trash."

Minion gave his version of a snort. "Yeah, well, there's sure plenty of _that _around here. But you were right, sir, I found this." He came over, holding out a digital camera with an attached night lens. "There's a KMCP property sticker on it, and the power's getting low. It looks like it was locked on the video record setting."

Megamind took the thing with his free hand, scanning it quickly. "This may not belong to KMCP anymore," he said, mostly to himself. "They replaced all their field cameras with newer models six months ago. This is one of their old ones."

Minion blinked, startled. "How do you know _that, _sir?"

The green eyes rolled in expressive amusement. "Ah, Minion, you forget who _really _invented the SD card. I have a few backdoors to access their data if I want, so I keep track of any major purchases by groups I might find a need to hack into in the future." He thumbed the button to activate the rear display screen and scan the contents of the card. He was amused by the first items, still images of him working on the rooftop, of Metro Man's arrival and their brief scuffle. There were a few pictures, disturbingly clear, of Blade, before the display shifted to a video replay — so clumsily, he was positive it had been by accident. The sound was very low, and he didn't bother to try to turn it up. The visual alone was disturbing, and it suddenly shifted to a strange angle as the camera was dropped. There followed blurs as it was moved around, then discarded — but it was left active. Apparently the punks hadn't realized it was set to record video, not stills. He thought there was nothing more to see, and then, he recognized flashes of himself, fighting the heavies and taking them out. The device ran out of juice before it reached the end of the recorded contents.

Megamind thought hard and fast. Minion had gone to finish searching for any other clues as to the woman's precise identity, and he had a decision to make. The evidence on this little data card would certainly be enough to convict Blade of murder and the other punks as willing accessories; from the bits he'd heard as he skipped through the video, it would also implicate Rock Bradford in the gas main explosion, and possibly drug trafficking as well. But it also showed too much, of his involvement and of this woman's face. Courts would have a field day with it, ruining his image as a supervillain, and quite likely destroying the woman's life as she was dragged through a potentially endless round of trials as a witness. Neither was a pleasant prospect. But there was another option, still unpleasant, but with the possibility of fewer dangerous repercussions.

"That's all there is, sir, except for this," Minion reported as he finished his search. He held up a case for a telephoto lens, its webbing strap also marked with the KMCP logo. "We really ought to see about getting the trash picked up—" He motioned to the still comatose thugs. "—and her taken to a hospital. Maybe we can just make a call from a pay phone..."

But Megamind shook his head. While he'd been examining the contents of the camera's memory card, he'd felt the woman grow very still. She was still alive, but she'd slipped even more deeply into shock, perhaps entering a coma. If her head injuries included anything more severe than a bad concussion, time could be critical. Villain though he was fated to be, he didn't want her to die. "I don't think she has that much time," he said softly, thinking.

"Then what can we do, sir?"

Off to the west, in the direction of the lakefront festivities, the first rumbles of the traditional grand finale could be heard, accompanied by the bright flashes that would soon grow brighter and brighter. "I have an idea," Megamind said, setting aside the camera. He reached around to the back of his gunbelt and brought out the remote. Its surface was scarred by the blast from Metro Man's laser vision, but it was only superficial. The blinking red _ARMED _light was still lit, and there was no damage to the main body, nor to the controls. He decided.

"Take care of her, Minion," he instructed, relinquishing his hold on the at-best semi-conscious woman. "I'll be right back."

The robotized fish — whose current body was farther back along the evolutionary chain of great apes, more akin to a tall chimpanzee or orangutan than a gorilla, lighter but not as powerful — complied without question, though he gave his boss a puzzled look in passing. Megamind trotted off to the turn in the alley and disappeared around the corner.

Beyond Minion's sight, he continued on until he reached the street, where the car — just recently modified to achieve invisibility — was waiting. From that position, he could just barely see the top of the long empty Metro Glassworks building, where he had been setting up his various devices just before Wayne had showed up. It was a little far to be certain it would work, but he aimed the remote and pressed the _IGNITE _button.

There was a slight crackle and flicker of what looked like firecrackers on the distant rooftop — and just as the show at the lakefront began to build to its climax, the skies over Rustville blazed with the sudden fire of a massive display of specially crafted fireworks, smokes and lasers, exploding rockets, flares, and nigh onto every kind of showy fire and light imaginable — all the lights and explosions, of course, in electric blue and blinding silver. It outshone the city's display by at least an order of magnitude; Megamind was particularly pleased with the effects that caused his trademark M design to literally blaze in glory across the skies above the entire city. He had no doubt that this would annoy certain people he _wanted _to annoy, and attract the attention of one specific person. To hopefully guarantee it, he went out into the middle of the broad, empty street, dancing gleefully under the lights of his creation, his attention actually focused elsewhere.

_Ah, here it comes! _As much as Wayne irritated Megamind by catching him unawares via his superpowers, there were rare occasions on which the blue genius found the predictability of his foe's reactions to certain stimuli useful, if he was properly prepared for it. Even with the thunder of incendiary art shaking all of Rustville, he was able to concentrate well enough to hear the far too familiar shriek of air that always preceded Metro Man's super-swift arrival. He calculated the direction, counted the seconds, _one, two—_

"Time out'" he declared, spinning on his heel and holding up one hand in the gesture they'd somehow agreed upon, years ago. And as expected, there was Wayne, one second fired up with determination to nab him for disturbing the peace or shooting off fireworks without a permit or something equally, ridiculously petty, the next second brought up short, literally, by the Rules of their Game.

Nonetheless, Scott scowled. "You can't use that to avoid justice, Megamind!" he snapped. "That gas main explosion—"

"Was none of my doing, though, oh, I _knew _you would try to blame it on me! Just ditch the high and mighty super dramatics and listen for a change, Wayne. I have some _real _hero work for you." He started back toward the alley at an easy run, gesturing for his adversary to follow. When Scott didn't, he turned to glare at him, hands on hips. "I know you want to just haul me back to prison and be done with it, but this time, things aren't that simple. You're supposed to be the superhero, not me! Does all that hair suck the intelligence straight from your brain? Or is it just another mass of muscle up there? Do _I _have to tell _you_ how to do your own job? This is a matter of life and death!"

Megamind could see the thought processes making their way across Wayne's face at what to him seemed a ridiculously slow pace. Finally, the hero acquiesced. "All right, I'll go along — but no tricks!"

The blue genius snorted as he resumed his course into the alley. "If I'd known it could be _that _easy, I'd've sent you an engraved invitation years ago!" He said nothing more as he led his nemesis to the very disturbing situation behind the abandoned chemical factory.

As they returned to the area near the equipment yard, with the crime scene clearly, if strangely, lit by the still blazing blue light from Megamind's incendiary display — which had been designed to linger at least until midnight, or until his super rival figured out how to end it — Wayne frowned, taking in the sprawled bodies, the blood, and other more grisly sights. "Did _you _do this?" he demanded, abruptly pure Metro Man, champion of justice.

Megamind sneered. "Oh, please, grow up! I may be a criminal genius, but unlike mere human vermin, _I _have standards! I don't kill and you know it!"

The hero had been about to say something about people who had been killed by that gas main explosion, but he stopped short, remembering the villain's assertion that he hadn't done it. Oddly, Wayne didn't require further proof to believe him, since he had long ago learned that if Megamind could be said to have one peculiar virtue, it was that he always owned up to the crimes he committed. Granted, he was proud of them, not remorseful, but it was still a form of honesty. Using his vast array of super senses, Wayne quickly assessed the situation. "These five aren't dead," he noted, gesturing to the strangely stunned hoodlums.

"No, it's just a simulation," Megamind confirmed as he headed toward Minion and the girl. "Very effective, but temporary. It should wear off in about an hour."

Having looked more closely, the hero frowned. "That's Blade Bladowski," he pointed out, recognizing the gaunt killer, "Rock Bradford's executioner. Did he do that?" One thumb jerked toward the dumpsters and their horrific contents.

The villain nodded. "Yes, it's obviously his trademark handiwork. I wasn't here to actually witness it, thank God."

"But you took him and his goons down?" Wayne sounded incredulous.

This time, Megamind shrugged. "What can I say? Words were exchanged, they insulted my intelligence, and I had to defend my honor. There _are _some civic improvements I support, after all — in particular certain ones concerning pest control. Consider this my public service work for the century."

Wayne shook his head. "You just won't give up this senseless life of evil, will you?"

"If you have a destiny, you should follow it. Don't forget, you're the one who taught me that, back in _shool _—and if you don't like the results, blame yourself." When his rival opened his mouth to answer, Megamind didn't give him the chance. The talk was taking a turn that made him uncomfortable, especially in light of his real reason for summoning the hero. "Just drop it, all right? Those punks won't be going anywhere for a while, so you can come back and bring them to justice later. There's something else that needs immediate attention." He crouched down beside Minion and the woman, motioning for Wayne to join them.

"Blade and his thugs worked her over," he explained when the big man had also crouched down, his brow furrowed with heroic concern as he finally noticed the battered woman. "I believe they caught her and thought she was a reporter, spying on them, though I don't recognize her as anyone local. Do you?"

Carefully, Wayne lifted her face toward the light. Her eyes were shut now, and the glow from above made the damage to her face look even more ugly. Megamind felt something strange squeeze his gut, an unusual wish that he hadn't chosen to use so much blue light in his display. Ordinarily, he would have considered it the most beautiful color imaginable, but on so many livid bruises streaked with half-dried blood, it was disturbing.

Wayne shook his head. "No, she must be someone new." His eyes focused on her injuries with inhuman intensity. "She's in pretty bad shape, but no skull fractures. Do you know if they—"

"No," came the emphatic reply. Megamind didn't want to hear him say the words. "They were going to, but they didn't get that far."

His nemesis looked up at him with an expression of wonder that made the villain squirm. "Did you take them out to save her?"

The smaller alien fidgeted. "Well, yes," he blurted out. "But you don't have to make it sound so _gall-ahnt._ I've been wanting an excuse to bring Blade and his flunkies down a few pegs for years." It was a sound excuse, he thought. "Look, I know it's a perfectly ridiculous request, but can we stop talking about how fantastic I am and just get right to the point?"

Wayne snorted, having thought he would never hear those words coming from that mouth. "Whatever you want, little buddy," he smirked, enjoying the way it made the villain flinch.

"Don't _ever _call me that again! Not everyone is as grotesquely huge as you, and I am most certainly _not _your 'buddy!' Let's focus, here. She needs help, she needs it _now, _and I can't get it for her fast enough. _You _can. Am I correct in presuming that other people were hurt in that explosion?"

The hero scowled. "Yes, and you—"

The sharp look Megamind gave him would have frozen helium in the heart of the sun. "I _told _you, I had nothing to do with it!" he snapped, rightfully angry. "I may be the biggest thorn in your side, but you know damn well this is _not _my style! If you can't get that through your thick skull, Mr. I'm-So-Perfect, then you should think of turning in your Hero License!"

It was true that Wayne Scott could be pretty thick-headed at times, and he had a tendency to not let go of some ideas once they came to him. But he also knew very well that not only was Megamind telling the truth about that explosion being utterly unlike him, he was also the kind of person who never swore at others using the conventional expletives unless he was driven to it by an extreme need to make himself heard. Understanding that, Wayne accepted his rival's claim of innocence as fact. He nodded his acquiescence. "Sorry, you're right. What were you thinking, then?"

Inwardly, Megamind sighed, relieved to have gotten the idiot onto the proper track. "I was thinking that you can fly her anywhere in a matter of seconds. Take her to whatever hospital is accepting the most explosion victims, get them to take her as a critical emergency. From you, they won't ask who she is, they'll just act first and work out the details later. Tell them she was dug out of the rubble, hit with shrapnel from the blast, whatever works to explain her condition and her appearance."

"And you don't want any credit for it? People might excuse some of your bad behavior if you did a good deed once in a while..."

The villain hardly thought so. "Oh, I'm sure," he said, his words dripping sarcasm. "I don't need that, like I don't need word getting around on the streets that I've gone vigilante against the Bradford Gang — like _she_ doesn't need to be pegged as a victim of gang violence who managed to escape. If any of them think that, they'll consider her a liability and go after her to finish the job."

Metro Man was actually impressed with his reasoning, and his obvious motivation. "And you want to protect her from that. Say what you will, li— Megamind. You've got a nasty little piece of hero somewhere in that evil heart of yours."

The alien ground his teeth. "Yes, and you no doubt gave me the tumor," he hissed. "I'm planning to perform self-surgery to get rid of it at the earliest opportunity. Will you do as I ask, or do you prefer to let her die while you waste time talking?"

"I'll do it, of course," the hero agreed, standing for a moment to remove his cape. "We'd better switch yours for mine, first," he suggested.

When Megamind answered with a frown, Minion — who made a habit of staying out of his boss's "discussions" with Metro Man — spoke up. "Sir, I think that's a good idea." He hastened to explain when the frown was turned on him, mixed with the hurt of hearing what to Megamind sounded like betrayal coming from his best and only friend. "If you want people to think that Metro Man rescued her from that explosion site to protect her from the gangs thinking she'd gotten mixed up with their dirty work, she can't show up in public wrapped in your cape! They'll ask questions!"

The frown vanished the instant Megamind saw his point. "That's true. Good thinking, Minion."

Wayne's smile was wry as he handed over his own cape. If it made the little guy more comfortable to think this was the fish's idea, so be it. "Take care of her while I take care of them," he said instead. While the villain and his henchfish went about carefully unwrapping the black and blue cloth from the injured woman — who, even unconscious, seemed very reluctant to let it go — the superhero swiftly emptied one of the dumpsters, carefully avoiding any disturbance of those containing the bloody evidence of the brutal murders. That done, he collected the five insensate thugs, piled them into the big metal hopper, closed the rusty steel lids, then melted their latches and hinges into solid masses of metal with his laser vision. He returned to the others just as Megamind was about to finish wrapping the woman with the hero's white and gold cape. Wayne saw that the black-gloved hands were shaking a bit, but he had the good sense not to ask why.

"They won't be going anywhere, now," he said instead, clapping his hands together as if brushing away the dust of hard work. "Just in case I can't get back before they wake up. I don't suppose you'd like to save me the work another day and just hitch a ride back to the prison right now?"

The look Megamind gave him was one of pure disgust. "And I don't suppose you'd like to save me the work of coming up with another evil plot, and just leave Metrocity right now?"

"Fair enough," Wayne allowed. He started to bend over to pick up the woman, but Megamind for once was quicker, and the hero didn't try to stop him. He _had _been the one to save her from certain death, after all; he should have the privilege of putting her into the hands that could most easily complete the rescue. He nodded gravely as he accepted the burden, noticing but not mentioning the genuine concern on the blue face. "I'll get her the best help possible," he promised, "and then I'll come back to pick up the trash and sweep the area, just in case she left behind a car or something that could be used to identify her to the wrong people. Though sooner or later, the police will have to know—"

"No," Megamind said firmly. "Keep her out of this. You don't know what it's like, living with trauma, with real fear. If they use her as a witness, even if they keep her out of the actual courts, it'll ruin her life. She's young. At least let _her _have a chance to recover properly, to _live _it." His implication — that he had been robbed of that possibility when he was a child, most specifically by Wayne himself — was clear.

Even so, Scott's years of dedication to justice would not let him leave it. "But she—" he began, only to be cut off by a gesture from the alien.

"I can provide them with all the proof they need — anonymously, of course. It'll show up at the DA's office first thing Tuesday morning. You have my word on it. No crossed fingers, this time."

The hero wasn't quite at ease with the suggestion, but he also knew his adversary well enough to know when he was being totally honest. He gave his acceptance with a single brusque dip of his head, then took off into the blue-lit night.

The two left behind watched him go; then Megamind bent down to pick up the camera and the lens case Minion had found. As he straightened, the fish held out his cape, but the villain shook his head.

"Let's go home, Minion," he sighed, exhausted. "I suddenly feel like I could use a long, long bath." He needed to wash away the dirt and the smells of having dealt with slime like Blade — but privately, he was wondering if he would ever be able to wash away all traces of the strangely... _good_ things he was now feeling as the result of all his disturbingly unvillainous behavior.

_To be continued…._


	7. Chapter 7

VII

_Back in the present..._

"He did keep his word, you know," Minion said sometime later, when he finally came to the end of the tale as he knew it.

Prompted by his story, Roxanne's mind had been filling in many gaps from her point of view, parts of the incident Minion couldn't have known, some details so horrifying, she still pushed them away out of protective instinct. It made her shudder to think of the more awful things that had happened that July night — but mixed with the images of pain and brutality were others, breathtakingly strong, of unexpected compassion and trust. Somehow more powerful than her own shuttered suffering and the insanity of Blade and his thugs was the image of a younger Megamind, nervous, stubborn, fiercely protective, promising to never hurt her, ever. It sent a shiver up her spine to realize that Minion was right.

He'd kept his promise. Not once had he ever hurt her, and he never would. She'd known it since before the first kidnapping. She hadn't been able to remember _why_ she could be so certain — but now she did, and the enormity of that promise and all that had led to it being made was overwhelming.

Minion didn't know what she was thinking or feeling; she'd gone very still while listening to him, trying to focus on his words while she dealt with the memories flooding to fill empty spaces in her mind that she hadn't known were there. Wayne had done as he'd promised to do. She had been taken to a hospital and cared for without question, because Metro Man had requested it. He must have also gone back to find her car in Rustville, using his law enforcement connections to trace it to her and her address. He must also have moved it, for she clearly remembered that it had been waiting for her back at her apartment when she was discharged from the hospital. It had made it look as if she, like many others that day, had chosen to leave the car at home and instead had taken one of the city buses headed for the crowded lakefront festivities, a bus that had been caught in the gas main rupture. The hospital hadn't known who she was upon admission; even before she'd regained consciousness and had been able to tell them, Metro Man had returned to provide them with that information. She'd always wondered how he'd known — "Just part of my job, Miss," was how he'd brushed aside the question, and she'd accepted it because after all, he _was _a superhero, he'd just saved her life.

Perhaps technically, he had, as he'd been the one to take her to medical help before her injuries — some of which had been life-threateningly severe — had killed her. At the time, her battered brain had needed to lock away any memory of the nightmare that had happened in that terrible alley, and so it had eagerly latched onto the story of the explosion, substituting the sounds and scents of fireworks and rockets for the gas line blast, chunks of flying debris for clubbed and weighted fists, the horror of a more commonplace disaster for the bloody violence of back alley murder. Appropriate images were fed to her imagination by the various news media, and without knowing it, she'd absorbed all of it like a greedy sponge as an unconscious means of achieving transference, preferable to leaving a gaping hole in her memories. In her mind, Metro Man had saved the day, had saved _her,_ and she hadn't known that in accepting it as truth, she had told herself the biggest lie of her entire life.

She couldn't really blame herself because her mind had needed to use such means to protect her from truly horrifying mental and physical trauma. But it was one thing to accept this clinically, as nothing more than a medical diagnosis to explain the repressed memories. It was quite another to accept that in order to do it, her mind had cast Metro Man in the role of her savior when that part actually belonged to another — and to her utter mortification, a person she had scorned and even vilified, at the time because of the not-so-whispered rumors that the gas main explosion had been caused by Megamind, and since then because he _was_ Megamind, inept as an evil supervillain but quite successful as a royal pain in the collective butts of western Michigan. Her brain, desperate to forget the ugly truth of what had been done to her, had shunted aside all the eventual mentions of Rock Bradford and his complicity in the genuinely criminal acts of that day. Megamind had been cast as the perpetual villain in her mind — and while he certainly was not innocent of doing wrong on other occasions, in this, the first time she had personally laid the blame at his feet, he'd been completely and utterly innocent.

Worse, _he _had been the hero, not Metro Man, not the person whom she would so come to admire, she would win herself the labels as his Number One Fan and even girlfriend. Her memories weren't perfectly clear, but even her concussed brain had been aware of someone, a surprisingly small blur of blue and black, very efficiently taking out Blade's heavies, then taking down the killer himself with equal efficiency. She remembered, oh, much more clearly, that same blue person trying to help her, assessing her injuries, offering reassurance, wrapping her in something warm and heavy that to her had felt like a shield of protection against all the horrors of the world. And if she'd just remembered that part of the truth, if she'd been able to acknowledge who had truly saved her, to thank Megamind for what he had done, perhaps the next eleven years might have been very, very different. Perhaps _he _would have been very different.

Struggling to process this most overwhelming of realizations — that if he had just once been appreciated as the unselfish hero he'd been, Megamind might have begun to reconsider his life of crime much sooner — Roxanne felt her chest tighten and her eyes burn with tears she couldn't shed for fear that if she started, she would never be able to stop. It wasn't her fault that things had turned out as they had — and yet, it was. She had held the proof of it locked inside her, and even though she'd remembered nothing of it before today, she couldn't help but feel more than a little bit confused and guilty now.

While her brain was frantically trying to make sense of all this stunning information, Minion, unaware of her dilemma, had been idly staring at a wilted flower in a vase on the table, placed there before he and his ward had had their falling out. His thoughts, however, were on the past, both near and more than a decade ago.

"The boss told Mr. Scott that he'd have the evidence at the District Attorney's office when it opened the day after the holiday, and he did," the ichthyoid explained. "He spent most of the day before extracting just the right things from the camera's memory card and putting them onto a new one so that there would be nothing to connect either him or you or even KMCP to the murders or the capture of Blade and the others. He was able to strip the data of anything that could link it to the camera you'd used, so the DA got anonymous records of Blade killing two men, and him saying that Rock Bradford had caused the gas main explosion as a diversion. I don't know where he got them from, but Sir was able to send along other, more admissible evidence to show that this had been just the latest in a string of murders and serious criminal acts ordered by Bradford and executed by Blade, and others. I wouldn't be surprised if he persuaded a few of his lifer 'uncles' to provide that in exchange for other favors."

He made a sound of disgust that accurately expressed his feelings toward the gang members. "Between the video and Metro Man's testimony about where he'd captured Blade when he went looking for Sir after he'd set off his light show, the police and FBI had enough clues to know where and how to start tracking down Bradford and his gang. It didn't take long until all of them were behind bars. Blade and his accomplices were convicted very quickly, though because Michigan outlawed capital punishment over a hundred and fifty years ago, they couldn't be executed. It didn't matter, since the other prisoners who knew Blade and his reputation took care of that before he could even try to appeal his case. I think the same thing happened to Bradford and a lot of his people. They were into the kinds of 'business' that even hardened criminals can find unforgivable."

Roxanne had been listening, though not as attentively as she had while he'd been telling the rest of the story. Her mind was still spinning from the unexpected discovery of the fact that so much of what she had taken for granted as solid truth was now turned inside out. After Minion had fallen silent, she took several deep breaths, then found her voice. "That wasn't the only promise Megamind kept," she said, very, very softly.

Minion nodded, understanding. "I know, Sir told me. He's never hurt anyone on purpose, not unless he was fighting in self-defense or to protect someone he thinks needs defending. He told me that he'd promised to never hurt you, and he's always been very careful about that."

"Then why did he always try so hard to make me scream?"

"He didn't _always _try." The alien fish looked away, seeming ill-at-ease. He toyed with the edge of her empty water glass as he considered his next words. At length, he sighed. "I want you to know that I like you, Ms Ritchi, I always have. But I don't know if Sir said anything to you about an argument we had before — ah, before the last, er, date you had with him."

At his implied question, Roxanne started, her thoughts jerked away from her continuing examination of the last eleven years. "What? An argument? No, I didn't know about that. What would you two fight over? You've always seemed like such good friends."

Minion coughed. "Oh. Yes. Well, maybe I shouldn't tell you, but... I don't want you think I hate you, because I don't. We fought about _you, _about Sir pretending to be someone else just to spend time with you. It didn't seem right to me, not just because he was lying to you, but because he was lying to himself, too. I was sure he'd wind up hurt pretty badly, because I was sure you'd be angry with him when you found out what he'd been doing. Not because I think you're a bad person, quite the opposite. But you have to understand that the only reason I'm here on Earth is because the boss's parents sent me with him with the job of protecting him. I've done the best I can, and while it hasn't been easy because of some of the choices he's made, I think I've done a pretty good job."

He sighed again, more heavily. "But the one thing I can't protect is his heart. It didn't take long for him to find out who you are, eleven years ago; I think he knew before you left the hospital. When everybody thought that Metro Man saved you from that gas main explosion, it was okay, because Sir had wanted people to think that so Bradford's gang didn't try to go after you, or him. And when it looked like you and Mr. Scott were becoming friends, he let it go because that's the way things had to be, supervillains don't have friends who aren't other villains, especially not nice girls.

"But months later, after you got your big break as a reporter, when Metro Man started to give you all those exclusive interviews that no one else could seem to get, Sir thought that it would only be fair if _he_ got a chance to tell people his side of things. He thought that you might agree to do it to sort of return the favor he'd done for you. He tried to contact you for months, but you always blew him off or turned him down. And he was hurt by that, because it seemed like you were treating him badly on purpose, as if you were angry because he'd done something to hurt _you. _ The first time he kidnapped you, all he really wanted was to find out why you wouldn't interview him. He didn't know then that you didn't remember what had happened that night in the alley, that he was the one who'd really saved your life, not Mr. Scott."

"But it was true," Roxanne whispered, tears stinging her eyes more than ever, demanding to be shed, but she stubbornly refused to capitulate. "I _didn't_ remember, not any of it, until today. When I woke up in the hospital, I barely remembered who I was and where I lived. All the doctors and nurses and staff kept telling me that I was so lucky to have been saved from that big explosion by Metro Man himself, they even had his cape to prove it, and I vaguely remembered somebody wrapping me in a cape when I was being rescued. There were pictures and videos of the blast damage and even some of the victims all over the television and newspapers. They didn't say anything about gang troubles that day — or if they did, they underplayed it so much I just didn't notice. A lot of people thought Megamind was responsible for the explosion, even though Metro Man said he wasn't, he was too busy creating silly mischief at the fireworks display that night. Everything I kept hearing felt real and seemed right, especially when Metro Man showed up in my hospital room to see how I was doing. I guess my mind accepted it because it felt... less frightening. I just didn't remember the truth, Minion, I swear! And I never thought that Megamind was responsible for putting me in that hospital. I _knew _he wasn't, but I couldn't say how I knew."

Minion nodded. "That's what I've thought, and really, I always felt it must've been a blessing for you, not remembering something so awful. It wasn't until that first time he kidnapped you that Sir realized you hadn't deliberately turned on him after he'd tried to help you; you really _didn't_ remember anything. That's part of why he kept on kidnapping you, you know, why he tried to scare you. It wasn't just because of your connections to Mr. Scott, though that did become a big part of it. Saving someone's life, that's a kind of romantic thing — romantic like in the old swashbucklers and knights in armor and stuff. He had something of a crush on you, and he wanted to shock you to get you to at least _remember_ what he'd done for you. He didn't want to just be forgotten, like he'd never done anything to help — like he didn't even exist, except as a cartoon villain without feelings. When you didn't remember _anything_ after years of him trying, I figured you never would. And the whole Bernard thing — I thought he'd either come up with some new idea to try to jog your memory, or he'd just thought..."

The piscine shrugged his robotic shoulders. "Well, I don't really know exactly _what_ he was thinking. It just seemed so wrong, such a huge mistake that I knew he'd wind up hurt worse than ever. I didn't think it was meant to be, because everyone knew that you were Metro Man's girlfriend. I thought he was safe enough when he just had the crush, but when it went too far..."

The golden-eyed gaze returned to look directly at Roxanne, and apologetically. "I was right about what would happen — but I was wrong, too. I never thought that Sir would _really_ fall in love. He's been hurt so much just for being different, I didn't think that was a risk he'd ever be willing to take. But I guess love doesn't think that way, not when it's real. And he _does_ love you, Ms Ritchi, I know that now."

Seeing the reaction of astonishment on Roxanne's otherwise stricken face, Minion's large eyes widened with his own shock of realizing what he'd just revealed. "Oh, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that, not if he hasn't! But you should've seen him go to work after he saw you on television and you said that you needed him — I was so proud of him! He may not have super strength and all the physical superpowers like Mr. Scott, but he knows how to be a hero, oh yes, he does. I wish so many terrible things hadn't had to happen to make him finally own up to it, but _that's _the person I always knew he could be, the person he really _was, _until he was hurt into hiding it. It may be difficult for him, adjusting to such a big change, but I'm glad it finally happened. And I'm glad to know you don't hate him — or am I wrong about that, too? I suppose it would be hard to forgive someone who kidnapped you so many times."

But Roxanne shook her head vigorously, struggling to find her voice in the thickness clogging her throat. "No! No, Minion, I don't hate him, I—" Suddenly, the dam she'd built to hold back her tears disintegrated. They streamed down her cheeks as she gasped for air. "Oh, my God, what have I _done—?"_

Minion's expression of fond pride for his ward swiftly turned to one of concern for their guest. "Oh, Ms Ritchi, you can't blame yourself, you didn't do anything...!"

"But that's just the point!" she half-sobbed. _"I didn't do __anything__! _All these years, I've been singing the praises of Metro Man because I started out thinking he'd saved my life from some stupid gas line explosion — and it was _Megamind _who saved me from something much, much worse! And all I ever did was kick his ass on the air just like everybody else, because he was the bad guy, that's what you're supposed to do to bad guys — and he _wasn't! _Even if he made a lot of lousy decisions and caused trouble since then, just that once, I should've at least _thanked _him, and I _couldn't, _because I _didn't remember! _Why didn't anyone ever _tell _me?"

"I don't know why Mr. Scott didn't, but _we_ didn't want to see you hurt again," the ichthyoid said simply. "Sir and I agreed about that, after he realized that you'd blocked the memory. He did what he did back then to save a person he didn't know from something horrible, and he just couldn't come right out and tell you. He read a lot of stuff about repressed memories and memory lapses after we found out what had happened to you, and he figured that if you could be kind of... nudged into remembering on your own, it would mean you were _ready _to remember. Just blurting it out — well, if you hadn't been ready to hear it, you wouldn't've believed him, and you would've gotten _very _angry with him. I guess maybe I should've kept my mouth shut, but once you told me things that meant you'd started to remember, I thought it would be easier for you, hearing it from me. I'm sorry if I made a mistake."

Roxanne stared at him, at the honesty of his expression, and knew that he was right. Until she was ready to remember on her own, she would have been furious with anyone who tried to tell her that her memories were wrong — _especially_ Megamind. She would have lashed out at him for being so evil and full of himself in even _suggesting _that such a thing could have happened — after all, hadn't she done just that when his disguise as Bernard had been exposed? He'd tried to explain, and she hadn't even given him a chance, just lashed out because she was angry at having been made to feel like a gullible fool. She'd exposed feelings in him that were far from villainous, spat on them, and then left him. Alone. In the rain.

It was too much. The sobs she'd been struggling to contain broke free to join the tears; she buried her face in her hands, and cried her heart out.

It had been a very long time since Minion had seen anyone break down like this, not since his ward had been a child. He'd never felt a need to offer comfort to anyone else, and he was afraid that this might have been his fault, that he'd said something very, very wrong to upset Ms Ritchi. He was just about to reach out one hand to touch the woman's shoulder when a drowsy voice called from the hallway outside the kitchen door.

"Minion, is supper ready yet?" Megamind asked, yawning as he stepped into the open doorway, dressed in the black silk robe now worn over a set of clean black and blue pajamas. The housekeeping bots had gnawed and tugged his favorite slippers to bits, so his bare footsteps were silent. He still looked somewhat sleepy, but his eyes were less bleary than they'd been when Minion had left him to wash up and rest. "I'm so hungry, I think my stomach's started eating itsel-_ooof!"_

The last word was not a mispronunciation, but rather the result of Roxanne suddenly and quite unexpectedly launching herself from the table to wrap her arms around him, tightly, still sobbing. Shocked by this puzzling but not unpleasant assault, caught completely unawares, Megamind patted her shoulders, afraid to do more until he knew what was going on. He looked at Minion, his wide eyes asking the question he couldn't seem to frame properly.

"She remembers, Sir," his guardian replied.

No elaboration was needed for him to know what was meant. "How much?" he asked, green eyes still fixed on Minion.

The answer was gently tendered. "Everything, I think. Certainly more than _I_ do."

Megamind swallowed a little nervously as he digested this revelation; then he looked down at Roxanne. He could hardly blame her for falling apart like this, since it had to be terrifying to have such awful memories come back after so many years of keeping them safely locked away. For himself, he remembered her leaning against him in that bloody alley, weeping in hysteria, seeking any comfort she could find, even that of a known villain turned unlikely rescuer. Then, he'd been completely at a loss, not knowing what to do; now, he knew.

Carefully, still afraid that he might be too presumptuous, he wrapped his arms around her as he'd wrapped his cape about her on that terrible night, offering solace from the pain, protection from the horror. She didn't pull away, but instead buried her face against his neck as she continued to weep. He let her, relieved that she trusted him enough to accept what little he felt he had to give. Minion discreetly moved off to the other side of the kitchen, getting things ready to prepare his boss's supper when he asked for it.

It seemed a long time before Roxanne's sobs dwindled, and yet not long enough, Megamind felt, given the memories of the long-forgotten day that must be invading her thoughts. But even before they had fully stopped, she managed to choke out a few intelligible words: "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry...!"

The ex-villain was flabbergasted. _"You're _sorry?" he asked, stunned. "For what? _I'm_ the one who did the lying and the kidnapping and generally making your life miserable. Why are _you _apologizing to _me?"_

But Roxanne's only answer was to shake her head, having spent all the breath she could spare for speaking. She was no longer sobbing uncontrollably, but he could feel her shudder with every exhalation, and sniffle with each breath she drew in. She was also still clinging to him for dear life, and while he didn't mind that — it was so much better than the anger he'd been expecting from her, once the rush of the day's success worse off — it was so unlike the Roxanne he knew, he didn't know what to make of it, what to do next.

More than a little worried, Megamind lifted his head, eyes darting about in search of his piscine friend. "Minion...?"

From the tone of that single word, Minion understood what was being asked. "I don't know for sure, sir — and it's really not my place to say, even if I did. I think you should go talk in private, without me hanging around. The conservatory would be a nice place. I'll have Pinky bring your supper there when you're ready for it."

That was a plan, and as always, Megamind liked having a plan to follow. He nodded. "Yes, that sounds like a good idea, thank you." As he said the words, the blue genius was aware that he needed to thank Minion more often, to make up just a little for all the years he had taken his loyal friend for granted. And he was also very acutely aware of other things for which he had to find ways to make amends.

He looked at the woman still in his arms, still holding onto him for dear life, and he tried to shift their position a bit to see if she would be amenable to Minion's suggestion. "Roxanne?" he essayed as gently as possible. "Do you feel up to taking a little walk down the hall, or would it be easier if Minion just left the room? Or I could carry you if you'd prefer, though that might be a bit pre..._somethingus,_ and I wouldn't want you to think I consider you a helpless female, because I most certainly do not...!"

His nervous babbling and total surrender to the word _presumptuous_ brought a new sound from Roxanne: a short but very much relieved bark of laughter, her appreciation of his comfortingly _normal_ behavior. She sniffled a few times more, then relaxed her stranglehold on him and shook her head. "No, I can walk," she said, her voice tear-roughened and quiet, but steady. "Though I'd appreciate a little support, if you don't mind. I'm still feeling a bit weak in the knees."

As her idea for how to achieve said support was to move so that she was standing beside him with her arms firmly wound around his narrow waist, Megamind was only too happy to comply, especially since she snuggled a bit closer when he dared to put one arm around her shoulders. Utterly amazed but also a bit afraid that he might accidentally do something to screw up, he shot a nervous look back in Minion's direction. The fish grinned widely, and gave his boss a confident double thumbs-up.

Thus encouraged, the ex-villain smiled back with as much self-assurance as he could muster, then led Roxanne out of the kitchen, heading for a showdown he'd been dreading more than any confrontation in his entire life.

_To be continued..._


	8. Chapter 8

VIII

Still dizzy from all she'd tried to absorb during the past hour, Roxanne had given no real thought to where she was being led, other than Minion's suggestion of another room as a nice place. In her befuddled brain, she thought he'd said _observatory,_ the makeshift dome on the roof of the Lair; it was not what she would've considered a nice place for any conversation, not unless they were bent on dragging up the most painful baggage to rub salt and a few knives into raw wounds. She simply didn't have the strength to argue, and thus was profoundly relieved to find she'd been mistaken.

The conservatory, a kind of indoor garden, reminded Roxanne of a cross between the Moorish architecture of the Alhambra in Spain and a Buddhist meditation garden. The filigreed white arches of doors and columns and windows looked as if they had been carved of ivory, glimpses of walls and floors were covered with geometric mosaics in soft blues and greens and purples. There were neatly trimmed and fancifully shaped potted trees as well as huge ferns and fragrant flowering shrubs and vines artfully placed and draped about the room. An array of small, exquisitely trained bonsai trees were set along the edges of a Zen sand garden. Among the lushest part of the plant life was a small stone fountain and pool; white lotus blossoms floated on the surface of the pool while the gentle motion of the fountain provided soothing music with its soft burbling voice. Before the fountain and the sand garden were several comfortable chairs and couches, set in a ring around a low, mosaic-inset hexagonal table. There were no visible light fixtures, yet the room had a soft ambiance like an early summer evening amid a grove of trees. Minion had been right; it _was _a nice place.

Despite the emotional upheaval she'd just experienced, Roxanne couldn't help but smile, albeit faintly. "Is there any kind of room you _haven't_ tried building?" she wondered, trying to keep her tone light. "Or is Minion into meditation?"

Megamind cleared his throat as he led her to the clustered seating. "Actually, we both do it, from time to time. One of my 'uncles' in prison, Uncle Wuxi, taught me how to do it when I was young, as a way to help accelerate healing. It works fairly well, as long as I don't have any broken bones."

"So, all of this beautiful luxury up here is really for therapeutic purposes?"

He laughed. "I suppose you could say that. Occupational therapy, physical therapy, therapy therapy — even bad guys like a little comfort and pampering when they can get it! If I wanted a life of nothing but hard beds, cramped rooms, cold floors, and _no _style, I could've stayed in prison. And when I feel the need to be in an dark, Goth kind of mood, I have the business parts of the Lair to haunt. Besides, do you know how hard it is to do Evil 24/7? Try it sometime, it's exhausting!" His outrageous manner had the desired effect, winning a quiet chuckle from Roxanne. Given the circumstances, it was a considerable victory.

Feeling a bit more at ease now that she was no longer verging on uncharacteristic hysteria, Megamind escorted her to pair of softly upholstered chairs where they could sit facing one another. He'd considered opting for one of the curved couches, just so they could remain physically closer, but something told him that it would be wiser if they were each able to maintain distinct personal space. It wouldn't be fair to either of them if their discussion degenerated into misunderstanding because of distractions, no matter how pleasant they might seem. It was time for both of them to lay their cards on the table, and he knew it.

When they were seated, more than a full minute of silence was allowed to pass between them, with only the gentle murmur of the fountain breaking the stillness. Naturally, they both started to speak at the same moment, then simultaneously closed their mouths again. A few moments later, Megamind decided to forge ahead. "I don't want to be rude about this," he said, glancing around but not at Roxanne, until his conscience managed to sputter into gear, telling him to grow up and look her in the eye. He did, but still hesitantly, still stinging from the last time he'd tried to broach the subject that was very much on his mind. "But before we start heading off into uncharted waters, there's something I really, _really _need to explain to you. About the whole 'Bernard' thing..."

This time, it was Roxanne who couldn't meet his eyes. "I know, it was a mistake—"

"No."

That single syllable, earnestly spoken, startled her into looking up. Megamind closed his eyes again, briefly, summoning his courage. "It wasn't a mistake," he said as his eyes opened, bravely remaining fixed on her face. "It was _never_ a mistake. Calling it a mistake implies that everything about it was wrong and regrettable — but I don't regret getting to know you better, or letting you get to know me better, the _real_ me, not... not the me I thought I was destined to be, what everyone said I was _supposed_ to be. Even if you wind up hating me for the rest of your life, I can't say that it was a mistake. The lies and the trickery, they were _wrong, _and I wish I'd never been so... _stupid, _to think I could get away with it forever. It's your job to uncover the truth, to get to the heart of things, and I was an idiot to think I could keep up the charade. But the only important thing I lied about was being Bernard, and I kept doing it because I never knew how wonderful it felt to be _accepted, _especially by someone... someone I'd... admired for years. I can't regret that. But it all started as an _accident, _not a mistake."

Roxanne blinked slowly, her mind still reeling from her larger change in perspective, and she gamely tried to focus on this one topic, for the time being. "An accident?" she echoed. "You accidentally started making yourself look like Bernard?" An hour ago, such a claim would have angered her; now, it was merely confusing.

The blue alien waggled one hand. "Yes and no. I didn't start using a disguise accidentally, but the situation that started the whole thing was purely accidental. I—"

He flushed a most abashed shade of lavender. "After I... took over City Hall — another thing I regret, though I don't think now's the time to start cataloging all of _that _— I saw the news piece you did on how much you and the city needed Metro Man, and I was so depressed by the whole mess I'd made of everything, I decided to do another stupid thing and destroy the museum. Not to spite the city or because I hated Metro Man, but because I hated how awful it made me feel to look at it and realize how much I'd screwed up, this time. When I went over to...er... sort of say my goodbyes, it was after hours, after you finished your report, so I thought everyone was long gone. Only it turned out I was wrong again. I heard you calling out and realized I wasn't alone, and I started to panic. Not because I was afraid of seeing you, but..."

The lavender in his cheeks became a bright purple; it took all his nerve not to look away. "I was there in my pajamas," he confessed. "And not ones like these. I... didn't want you to see me and think I was a completely juvenile idiot, running around in public in my jammies. I didn't want to hear you ridicule me, or yell at me to my face, or... laugh at me. I started to run and hide, but there was no place to go — and then I ran into Bernard. _He _started to make fun of me, didn't even think I was really _me, _and I sort of freaked out and did the only thing I could think of to kill two birds with one stone. I scanned his image, dehydrated him, and used the holowatch to make me look like him before you caught up with me. I was just trying to avoid getting you even more upset than I knew you already were, and making an even bigger fool of myself.

"The accident was just that all three of us were in the wrong place at the wrong time. And I _had _to get you out of the building before it was too late. I'd started the timer on the detonator and dropped it off that walkway before I'd even known either of you were there. If Bernard hadn't been around, I would've had to find some other way to get you out, but he was, I ran into him, and... well, you know the rest. After I got you into a cab and you were safely gone, I hadn't planned to ever use that disguise again. The only reason I did was because you called Bernard's cell phone, I answered it, and found out you were about to enter my Lair. All I was really thinking of then was getting you out again, and since you'd called 'Bernard,' I thought 'he' might be able to convince you to leave again. But when you called me 'partner' and hugged me...!"

He stopped, head drooping as he shook it. "That was the first time _anyone _had ever hugged me like that, the first time anyone _human _touched me that way. It was...like a drug. I don't know if you can understand that, it's probably been the most ordinary thing in the world for you, all your life. It made me feel like I could fly, like I could take off for the stars and never need to touch the earth again. And because it was you...!"

Roxanne hadn't thought it possible for him to blush any more deeply, but he did, seeming to shrink in on himself more and more with every word. "I'd sort of had a crush on you for years, and I knew if you knew it was really me under the disguise, you'd never come near me again. I was a fool, thinking it could possibly last. Sooner or later, you'd discover the truth, and you'd hate me more than ever. I knew it, Minion knew it — he even told me so. But I didn't listen. I lied to you, and I lied to myself." His voice dropped to a mortified whisper. "I don't know how you can sit there and listen to this and not want to storm out of here. I'm sorry, Roxanne. I'm so, so sorry. I promised I would never hurt you, and I have, in the worst possible way."

The silence between them returned for a few infinitely long moments. In it, Megamind, eyes focused on his hands, loosely folded on his lap, fully expected to hear the sounds of her walking away, leaving. Well, at least he'd told her the truth. If he didn't like the results, he had no one to blame but himself. When he heard the rustle of her shifting position, he thought, _This is it. Time to say goodbye forever._

Instead, he saw her hand reach out and touch his. He looked up timidly, afraid to believe she was actually touching him of her own volition, and he was startled to see tears on her face. "Then we both lied," Roxanne said softly, lest her voice should crack again. "To each other, and to ourselves. We both hurt one another just as you said, in the worst possible way. You didn't mean for things to get carried away like that — and I didn't mean to forget what you'd done for me when I was someone you didn't even know. You could've refused to get involved, but instead you saved my life, and how did I repay you? By becoming a huge Metro Man groupie and turning on you."

The green eyes widened hugely, shocked. "What?" Megamind blurted out, unwilling to accept that conclusion. "You couldn't help that — you were seriously hurt and didn't have a choice when it came to remembering or not. Really, Roxanne—!"

She reached out with her other hand to cover his mouth with her fingertips, stilling his protests. "Okay, I let you have your chance to explain without interrupting; now, it's my turn. Fair's fair."

He looked as if he really would have preferred to continue his protests, but when her fingers remained in place, sealing his lips, he finally gave in, nodding his surrender. "Fair's fair," he agreed when she removed her hand.

For the better part of a minute, Roxanne said nothing, instead fixing her gaze on the hand beneath her own, studying it. It was the same hand she now remembered clearly from the past, the one that had gently examined her injuries, had wrapped her in a cape of supple black silk, had carefully cradled her throbbing head to prevent further injury while she purged her stomach and tried to purge the horror from her soul. There was faint evidence of another decade's worth of wear and tear upon it, but it was still soft and warm and the color of a clean summer sky. She looked up at its owner's face. It had changed slightly as well, was more mature and graced with a neatly trimmed goatee of fine black hair, but the eyes were the same eyes that had been her lifeline to sanity on that awful, awful night. The concern she had seen in them was still there, but deeper.

A part of her wished that she could tell herself that this was something new, something she hadn't seen in those eyes between then and now. And even that part knew if she believed it, it would be yet another lie.

She dropped her eyes again, and sighed. "It wasn't my choice to forget what happened in that alley," she allowed. "But it _was _my fault when I pushed you away and wouldn't let you have a fraction of the time Metro Man was given to tell your side of the story. As a reporter, I should have known better. It wouldn't have been right to let you use your time to spread some kind of evil agenda propaganda, but I knew that wasn't what you'd asked for. It was my fault for not believing that there could _be _another side to the story, that you might have had legitimate reasons behind your vendetta against Wayne. That's what it obviously was, everybody knew it; you had some grudge against him, and by association the city, because he had made himself its protector. Oh, yes, everybody knew it was a grudge match — but nobody ever asked _why. _You were the bad guy, the villain, and that was all the explanation anyone needed."

She wiped her eyes with the back of one hand, brushing away the welling tears. "I always considered myself better than that, a better reporter, a better _person. Don't judge a book by its cover, judge a person by their actions._ But all actions have motivations, and part of a reporter's job is to get under the surface and find the answers to questions, the reasons behind actions. You wanted to tell me your reasons ten years ago, and I refused to listen. Not because I didn't remember that I owed you my life, but because I'd decided I already knew what was inside the book without even cracking the cover."

Her ragged laugh was self-deprecating. "Great trick, isn't it, right up there with seeing through lead. Even if I didn't owe you a thing personally, I owed it to myself and my profession to take a chance to get at the truth and not be a bloody hypocrite. Minion said that's why you kidnapped me the first time, because you wanted a chance to tell your side of things and I kept telling you to get lost. I know what I did and why, and I'm not proud of it. But was Minion right? _Is _that why you started kidnapping me, to get me to listen?"

When she received no audible answer, Roxanne looked up once more, expecting to see Megamind nodding silently. Instead, he was staring at the ceiling with a singularly distraught expression. "It wasn't?" she prompted, startled. She wouldn't have expected Minion to lie, unless he didn't know...

The sound the ex-villain finally made was one of surrender to the inevitable. "It was _part_ of the reason, yes," he admitted, "but not _all _of it. It's what I told myself to justify the act, since it was a rotten thing to do to someone I'd started to idolize because I'd saved her from worse than death and all that. It wasn't only an excuse, though; I _did _think I deserved at least one chance to tell people the real reasons behind my rivalry with Metro Man, especially since after saving you, I started to think that being a good guy felt pretty nice — a whole lot better than always losing! I wondered if hearing _why_ I became a villain might get some people to stop and think twice about me and the guy they kept fawning over like he was the Second Coming or something. I thought you'd be happy to give me that chance, since you were the one I'd helped, and reporters always seem to like getting exclusive interviews. I'd never even thought of doing that before, so it would've been a first.

"But you obviously didn't care for the idea. After three or four months of getting yelled at, ridiculed, and just plain ignored every time I tried to contact you, I was pretty angry, and hurt. It didn't make any sense to me, how I could get treated like that, like the way everybody else treated me, by someone I had actually _helped. _Nobody ever treated Metro Man like dirt when _he_ saved their lives, and I thought it was pretty unfair that you wouldn't at least show me the same courtesy. I wanted to know why when _I_ saved someone's life, that person would treat me like I'd been the one who'd tried to _threaten_ their life. I had a lot of weird ideas about that, and I wanted an answer. And I got one, all right, an answer I didn't like. I couldn't blame you for not remembering something I would've wanted to forget if it'd happened to me — so I blamed Wayne instead."

Roxanne sat up straight, surprised. "Wayne? Why? All he did was take me to the hospital, like you'd asked."

Megamind snorted, a frown narrowing his eyes. "Yes, and he kept showing up to see how you were doing, making the most of being your big hero, then doing favors for you after you were released and giving you exclusive interviews... providing lots of things for your brain to latch onto and shove me out of the picture entirely."

The reporter was shocked by that interpretation. "But — but he didn't do it deliberately...!"

The reply dripped sarcasm. "Oh, didn't he? Let me tell you, Ms Ritchi, grabbing the spotlight and pushing out anyone who even comes close to sharing it is something Wayne's been doing his entire life! Did you know that when we were sent off by our parents, my pod left my planet first, and Wayne's didn't leave until it had mine to follow. The lazy scuts who sent him off spent their time making his pod all pretty and comfy for their precious little golden boy, but they couldn't be bothered to plot a different course. It wasn't just a coincidence that we were sent to the same planet; his pod _followed_ mine, pushed it aside every time it detected that I was on a preferable course — and every time it did, I could see that insufferable little git inside it, taunting me — deliberately! He _knew_ that I was being used for his benefit, even then, and the first time we set eyes on each other after landing, he went right back into that same habit. I was his enemy, so I had to be painted as _everyone's _enemy. What kind of _hero_ goes around teaching other kids that it's okay to bully and ostracize someone they don't even know, just because of how he looks? Oh, the teacher didn't help, but Wayne didn't learn that attitude toward me from her. He'd had it long before we even came to Earth."

This was an aspect of their rivalry that Roxanne had never considered. "That sounds like a racial prejudice, or some kind of ongoing feud. Were your planets at war or something?"

The ex-villain shrugged, his scowl beginning to fade a bit. "I don't know. It's possible. I know that whatever happened to our sun wasn't a natural disaster. Black holes of that size don't just pop up out of nowhere, and our sun wasn't even the right kind of star to produce one, it was too small. If it had gone nova, it would've killed all life in the system first, then collapsed into a red dwarf, not a black hole. That wasn't really a black hole, anyway; it was more of a vortex, from what I can remember seeing of it before the hyperdrive on my pod kicked in. If I knew how to trace the course back through n-dimensional space to locate the originating coordinates, I'd try to find it again and take a closer look — though it'd probably take a telescope the size of the moon to do it. Wherever Wayne and I came from, it wasn't anywhere near this part of the galaxy."

Roxanne was both a little awed and a little puzzled by all he'd said, not being any kind of science expert. "You remember seeing what happened to your planet? Weren't you just a baby when you left?"

More of the alien's scowl disappeared. "Eight days old. But I remember everything. It's one of the mixed blessings of having a brain this big. I can sort of put certain memories into a state of inactive storage, but they never go away, and it can be extremely difficult to do even that much with anything that has a strong emotional aspect. Impossible, if the emotions are strong enough. I'm not entirely sure why, though I think it's a part of self-preservation instincts."

The color drained from the reporter's face. "So... you won't ever be able to forget—" She couldn't bring herself to say it, couldn't mention the memory of a recent night she desperately wished had never happened.

Megamind shook his head, knowing precisely what she couldn't say. "No. I won't. But that doesn't mean it will stay that strong forever. Equally strong positive emotions connected to the same event or person can weaken the bond with negative memories. And not forgetting isn't necessarily a bad thing. It does help me to learn from my mistakes, though it obviously can't prevent me from repeating them if I choose to ignore the lessons. I'm afraid I've done _that_ a lot more often than I should."

Roxanne didn't know quite how to respond to that, so she chose to focus on a larger issue. "Do you really think Wayne paid so much attention to me back then to deliberately influence my feelings against you, to force himself into your place in my memories of that night? So that I would never think of anyone but him as the hero?"

Now, the scowl was gone, replaced by a more troubled expression on the blue face. "I don't know," he admitted. "His memory isn't at all like mine; if it weren't for his superpowers, he'd barely remember that he wasn't born on Earth. And I don't think he really understands things like transference and repressed memory, certainly not enough to take calculated steps to cause it. But he's not above taking advantage of a situation for his own benefit." His snort of laughter had a note of contempt in it. "That seems to be something he came by naturally, given how his pod had been programmed. I have to wonder what would've happened to him if nobody else in the system had sent off an escape pod at the right time."

Megamind let his head hang back to stare up at the ceiling again; the laugh that escaped him was uneasy. "See what I mean? We came in here to talk about us, and who ends up getting the attention? Wayne, always Wayne. It's like he turns the brains of everyone around him into his mindless zombies, and nobody ever notices, even after he's gone."

"That's not entirely true," Roxanne said softly, beginning to understand something she'd never before seen quite so clearly: the real basis for Megamind's hatred of his rival, if it could even be called true hate. The only two survivors of their worlds now on Earth, their relationship had to be akin to that of polar opposite siblings, one the perfect golden child who can do no wrong, the other the perfect scapegoat who can do no right, outcast from the start because of his less than perfect appearance. One given unquestioning love and admiration, the other denied it, no matter how gifted he might be or how hard he tried to win some crumbs of affection. One blissfully unfamiliar with the pains of true rejection, the other only too familiar with it, and unable to ever forget it.

The tears flooded back into the reporter's blue eyes, and this time, she did not try to hide them when they began to fall, though she managed to speak through them, with occasional pauses to catch her breath. _"I've _noticed. Our meeting with him yesterday was a major wake-up call. No matter how much he feels cheated by life, the way he picked to start making his own choices was abominable. He walked out on us, knowing that it meant you'd get control — _and _the blame for 'killing' him to cover up his choice. That's not a hero. A real hero does what has to be done, doesn't resent having done it, and doesn't make other people pay for things they didn't do. They own up to their choices, even when other people don't like them. They don't run off and hide and refuse to get involved with the aftermath of their decisions because they'd have to face the music." She snorted at the strange appropriateness of the cliche.

She flinched slightly from surprise but did not pull away when warm fingers reached over to gently brush away her tears. "Well, that's over and done with, I suppose," Megamind said, his voice as soft as his touch. "It won't solve anything to try dragging him back into something he wants to avoid."

"Oh, yes, it will," came the shockingly fierce reply, causing the blue alien to freeze. "One way or another, he's going to get dragged back into the public eye, if I have to do it myself by blowing his cover sky high. I will _not _let him leave you with a murder rap hanging over your head. He's going to find a way to completely clear you, or I swear, I'll ask you to do to me what you did to Hal, just so I can have the pleasure of ripping him a new one myself!"

Megamind was so taken aback by her sincere determination to see justice done on his behalf, he was momentarily speechless. Then she pressed her cheek into the hand touching her face, the gentility of it completely at odds with her spoken anger, and he smiled. "I think I'd like to see that," he chuckled.

Roxanne's smile was strangely wicked, but a delight to see. "Actually," she admitted, snuffling away the dwindling tears, "I'd like to see _you _do it. When you figured out how to give someone else Wayne's powers, why didn't you give them to yourself? That's the first thing I would've expected you to think of."

His smile faded, and he withdrew his hand. He started to fidget, glancing randomly about the room. Light reflecting off the ripples on the water in the fountain cast odd shadows across his face at that particular angle, making it look like his entire expression was nervously flickering. "Well," he began, then paused to clear his throat. "For one thing, using Metro Man's DNA to reproduce his powers didn't even occur to me until you told... er... 'Bernard' that heroes aren't born, they're made. And once I was able to do it, I wasn't thinking about making myself more powerful. By then I'd realized the mistake I'd made, and I just wanted things to go back to normal, business as usual, villain fights with hero, scores a few points, gets tossed in prison, etcetera. I suppose I could've done what you suggest, but even if it could have worked, I didn't want to be the Evil Overlord, anymore. I just wanted to be Megamind, criminal genius and master of..."

He sighed expansively, shoulders sagging. "...not much, I guess. I was pretty much of a failure at being anything but a public nuisance — but at least I _was_ good at that!"

Roxanne nodded. "You _were_ exceptionally good at that. But you never thought of all the possibilities having real superpowers could give you, even when it came to being a nuisance?"

The oversized head shook. "No. I sometimes envied Wayne's powers because of the ways they won him effortless approval and admiration, but I never _wanted _them, I didn't want to be _him. _ I just wanted to be approved of and admired for being _me. _And being a hero? Pffft. I had it spelled out for me early on that it wasn't a career option. Even when I did things that were kind of heroic, it didn't work out." From the way he said it, it was obvious that he was thinking of the incident Roxanne had only just remembered.

"I'm sorry that turned out the way it did," she said as apologetically as she knew how. "You can't imagine just _how _sorry! I know I didn't have any control over it, but after Minion told me what he knew and I remembered a lot of things he didn't, it occurred to me that if I'd just remembered _who _had really saved my life that night, things could have been different, _so_ different, it scares me to think of it." She paused, searching for an adequate way to frame the question. "Eleven years ago, if I'd known that you'd saved my life just because you were there and saw that I needed help — if I'd thanked you for it the way I should have, how would you have felt about it?"

As he considered that scenario, the reporter could see the alien's mind busily at work via his mobile face. He nibbled at his lower lip for a bit, eyes narrowed in concentration; at length, he shrugged. "I — don't honestly know," he admitted. "To tell the truth, it felt _good, _knowing that I could do something like that and not get beaten to a pulp! Oh, I didn't start imaging myself as taking Wayne's place as the hero of anywhere or anybody, but there was something peculiarly satisfying about _helping_ another person that I didn't understand, until today. It would have felt even better if you'd thanked me for it, I'm sure. I don't know that it would've been enough to get me to give up my life as Wayne's personal pain in the butt, but I think I would've considered it more often."

"And you don't suppose it might've gotten you to think about switching sides? Not taking Wayne's place, but maybe finding your own place, doing good?"

The lavender blush was back in his cheeks. "Well...maybe just a little. Especially if it would've made _you_ happy. But it didn't happen that way." He squirmed. "Roxanne... about all those kidnappings..."

She held up one hand to still the explanation before it was offered. "Don't," she said, forcing new tears to remain at bay. "Don't apologize, Megamind, _please._ I thought that when we got around to discussing this, I'd be furious with you and at least want to punch you in the eye, but I can't, not now. Maybe when you kidnapped me, you were trying to get under Wayne's thick hide more than anything else, but I know you were trying to get me to remember, too. What you wanted from Wayne really doesn't have anything to do with what you wanted from me. And you didn't _really _want to make me scream; you wanted me to _remember,_ so that you could hear me say 'thank you.' Am I right?"

Megamind hesitated, unwilling to admit to something so... _needy, _but finally, he nodded. "Yes, that's all I wanted from _you._ But I gave up even hoping I'd get it a long time ago. It so obviously wasn't going to happen, there was no point. That's when things started to feel a little too... routine. Wayne wasn't the only one who felt that way."

"But you didn't give up like he did."

"No, I didn't. That's my best quality, isn't that what you said? I don't give up even when I know I don't have a chance. Sort of a backhanded virtue, and a double-edged sword. I also don't give up when I'm making a complete fool of myself." He didn't say it, but Roxanne could hear the unspoken words as clearly as if they'd been shouted: _Like right now._

The reporter sighed. "You're not being a fool," she insisted. "And I think I understand something else about all those kidnappings that you're not mentioning."

The green eyes blinked, genuinely puzzled. "Like what? How much they really ticked you off? How idiotic they all were because I was a totally predictable loser?"

She shook her head. "No. How much you liked me and wanted to be my friend, if I'd just given you even half of a quarter of a tenth of a chance."

One could watch the flush rise from the base of Megamind's neck to the tips of his ears and the top of his head like a rising indigo tide of embarrassment. "Oh," he said in a small voice. "That."

Roxanne managed a more earnest smile, swallowing her unshed tears. "Yes. That. I think if you can forgive me for treating you like a jerk when I _knew _you would never hurt me, I can forgive you for finding a way to spend time with me even when I would rather have given _you _a few whacks with the forget-me-stick."

He blinked again, as if he was seeing a mirage. "Really?" he fairly squeaked.

She had to fight a bit to restrain her ill-timed laugh. Instead, she leaned forward again and took both his hands. "Really," she vowed.

He swallowed this time, now blinking at the blue eyes that were much closer. "And... does that mean you're willing to give me a chance, now?"

She rolled her eyes in a coquettish show of thinking it over. "Oh, I think so."

Hesitance became hope. "Even if I screw up again and can't cut it as a hero?"

This time, her smile was neither tentative nor teasing. "You'll always be _my _hero, Megamind. No matter what." And with that, she leaned just a little bit closer, and kissed him.

It was fair to say that a veritable cyclone was making Megamind's head spin by the time she pulled away — not in horrified revulsion and shock, but simply to see his reaction. Having just received his first real, honest, uninterrupted kiss, Roxanne wasn't at all surprised by the expression of almost silly rapture on his face. It hadn't been passionate, but all things considered, he didn't look as if he could handle that quite yet, not unless he was willing to risk having his entire head explode. His eyes remained closed in perfect bliss, and she was beginning to think she'd somehow managed to paralyze him in that position when he spoke.

"Roxanne?"

"Yes, Megamind?"

"Would you mind if I asked you something?"

"Anything you want."

"You won't throw a drink in my face?

"No — though I'd like something _to_ drink. All that crying has made me thirsty."

"Good." His eyes suddenly snapped open. "Because I was going to ask if I could have Minion send in supper. I'm _starving!" _He dramatically clutched at his stomach, pulling the most absurd face of exaggerated agony Roxanne had ever seen.

That was enough to finally dispel the last of the gloomy doubts hanging about them. Laughing wholeheartedly, she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him again, grateful for his irrepressible nature that refused to stay dispirited for long. She almost sent the both of them tumbling onto the floor, but the ex-villain managed to catch and hold onto her as he brought them both to their feet, somehow managing to not break the kiss. When the need to breathe forced that inevitable parting, he didn't let her go, but instead spun her about, dancing and laughing in pure, infectious joy. Unable to resist, Roxanne joined in, reveling in the first real and unqualified happiness that she'd felt in far too long a time.

When he set her down again, winded from laughing more than from the delighted dance, they were standing near the fountain, with the soft music of the moving water and the scent of jasmine a most pleasant combination filling the air about them. Their eyes met, and though they were both smiling, Roxanne wondered at the strange shyness in the blue face.

Megamind opened his mouth, either to gasp for breath or speak, she couldn't tell which. Then he took a deep breath, seemed to reach some inner decision, then blurted out, "IloveyouRoxanne" in a single word, as if to do it any more slowly would cause the words to get caught and mangled even more badly on his tongue. He pulled his head back slightly, bracing for an affronted slap in the face.

But Roxanne not only continued to smile, she kissed the tip of his nose, lightly. "Yes, I know. Minion told me."

The blue face went from flushed to pale. "He _did?"_

"Mm-hm," came the ever-so-casual reply. "Accidentally, of course, and it's okay. Because I'm _pretty_ sure I love you, too." The kiss she added for good measure made it clear that any doubts she'd mentioned were purely for show.

The semi-dazed state of ecstasy that returned to Megamind's face lasted for a few moments after the kiss ended, then quirked into a crooked half-smile. "Accident, my giant blue head," he scoffed. "That fish is the sappiest hard-core romance addict in this arm of the galaxy."

Roxanne chuckled. "Well, go easy on him, anyway, okay? His heart's in the right place, after all. I think he just wants to see you happy."

The answering, "Hnnnn..." was patently unconvinced, already plotting suitable retaliation.

Experimentally, she moved one hand; the tip of her index finger traced the curve of his ear. The green eyes crossed in perfect pleasure, and she could swear he was actually purring. "Do it for me," she suggested, ever so softly.

"Ah... all right," he agreed when she stopped what she was doing, wondering if his brain was really leaking out through his ears. It certainly felt that way. "You _are _a terrible temptress," he added in amused accusation.

She grinned. "Thanks, I've been practicing."

"It shows. Minion!" he called, raising his voice to a mere semi-bellow so that it would carry back to the kitchen.

"Yes, sir?" came the prompt, echoing response.

Roxanne gave the ex-villain a "Don't you dare!" look of warning, to which Megamind replied with an innocent "Who, me?" pout. "Is supper ready yet?" was all he called back.

"Ten minutes, sir!" came the ichthyoid's enthusiastic reply.

The bellow then reduced to a normal volume. "Satisfied?" the former evil overlord smirked.

The reporter replied with a small smirk of her own. "Perfectly," she approved.

And they spent those next ten minutes indulging in what to Megamind was a wholly new but utterly rewarding kind of experimentation. Yes, he decided, being a hero wasn't going to be such a terrible thing, after all.

_To be concluded_


	9. Chapter 9

Epilogue

Between the police and insurance investigations, it took a week before the reconstruction of Roxanne's apartment could even be considered. During that time, she decided that so long as her new boyfriend and his beloved sidekick didn't mind — in fact were thrilled — to share their home with her, offering her any rooms she wanted as her temporary residence, she would accept their generosity without complaint. After all, there was no hotel in Metro City that could offer her such luxurious accommodations along with spa facilities and a five-star caliber chef ready and most willing to cook all her meals to suit her whims, for free. There was also the added bonus of getting to watch the city's new hero off-stage, in his comfort zone, where there was no need for him to put on any sort of face for the public. It was fascinating, and as multi-faceted an experience as the full tour she'd been given of his unexpectedly beautiful home.

But then, by the end of that first week, Roxanne had learned that when it came to the real Megamind, it was always wise to expect the unexpected. The Friday after the end of Tighten's reign of terror, Roxanne was finishing her breakfast in the sunny kitchen, trying not to think about a dull end-of-the-week meeting scheduled for that afternoon. She wondered if she would have to spend the coming weekend walking into town far enough to reach a city bus to go shopping, since Hal had flattened her car and the insurance company was still haggling over whether or not destruction by super-powered being constituted an act of God. Minion had been an absolute angel about driving her to work every morning, since Megamind was too busy to do it himself just now, and she felt that it would be an imposition to ask either of them to drive her around all weekend, just so she could go car and clothing shopping (the latter of which couldn't be put off much longer, since she'd been able to salvage only two decent on-camera suitable outfits from the ruins of her apartment). She had just started contemplating how she was going to afford a new-to-her set of wheels — having no faith in the insurance company coming through any time before the end of the century — when Megamind, disturbingly bright-eyed and energetic for the unholy hour of the day, plopped down in the chair beside hers at the kitchen table and asked, "How would you like your apartment rebuilt?"

Roxanne paused just as she was about to take a sip of her coffee and looked at the far too chipper alien over the rim of her cup. She really couldn't blame him for his enthusiastic attitude, given how his life had done a complete turn-about so very recently. While the brainbots carried out the tasks of clean up and repair around the city, returning to the Lair in shifts to be recharged, repaired, or given new instructions to carry out, Megamind had been working with civic leaders in planning certain upgrades to places and infrastructure that Hal had destroyed, educating the various police and emergency services in the systems he had used to control many kinds of crime during his tenure as Evil Overlord, and generally reacquainting the people of Metro City with their former villain, now defender. Things had been going astonishingly well — not perfectly, of course, since there were plenty of people who would need a lot of convincing before they'd be willing to forgive him his villainous past, and some who likely never would. But compared to his more than thirty years of being an outcast, alone in the world but for Minion, it was a literally miraculous improvement, so he had good reason to be happy.

Roxanne also liked to think that she was no small part of his giddy mood, and she was right. His insanely optimistic nature generally didn't allow him to stay down and depressed for long, but on those days when struggles with the more obstinate people opposed to his second chance in life had him sinking toward the bottom, the smallest sign of affection from her could raise him right back up and send his spirits soaring. She was fairly certain that this extreme reaction wouldn't last forever, but she was glad that she could have this effect on him during this very rocky part of his transition from evil to good. Then again, this was Megamind, so it was entirely possible that the condition would be, for all intents and purposes, permanent. Which would be just fine with her. It was rather heady stuff, knowing that you could have that immediately positive an effect on another person.

So when he sat down and popped out his most peculiar question about her apartment, Roxanne was just a wee bit confused. "How would I like my apartment rebuilt?" she echoed, examining the question in search of a more enlightening angle. "Well, the way it was without the drafty windows and leaky shower head would be nice, and having it finished before the end of the year would be good, though I'd rather have it back before the snow flies."

"Oh, no, that won't do at all!" was the new hero's insistent reply. Pinky, who had just filled Roxanne's coffee cup — having become quite attached to Daddy's house guest over the past few days — bowged a mite irritably when he snagged the coffee pot from the bot's claw as it floated by to see if Roxanne's barely-touched cup already needed a warm-up. Megamind ignored Pinky's annoyance, gesturing with his free hand while he filled an empty cup with the other. "You don't understand, I'm not talking about mere reconstruction, I'm talking major remodeling! Anything you want, any design, any style, any fixtures, you just have to name it!"

The reporter smiled. His enthusiasm, not to mention his suggestion, was sweet, if impractical. "That's a lovely idea," she admitted, "but I don't think my insurance company — or the owner of my apartment — will go for it."

The alien was appalled. "You mean you're not allowed to remodel your apartment to suit your tastes?"

"No, I mean neither they nor my insurance will pay for anything better than what I had before, if they pay at all. I'm sure the owner would love it if I made that place a _real _luxury apartment, but he's not going to pay dime one for any improvements."

"Oh, is _that _all?" Megamind waved one hand dismissively before reaching for the sugar bowl and cream pitcher, the latter of which was currently filled with a chocolate-mint cream. Roxanne was glad she tended to prefer her coffee black, at least in the morning. Watching him drop three sugar cubes and half the pot of cream into his mug made her teeth crawl — though given how thin he was, she figured it wouldn't hurt him. Maybe she should talk to Minion about sneaking a protein supplement into the cream — and most of the rest of his food, for that matter. Megamind would always be incredibly thin, that was obviously hereditary, but if he was going into full-time hero work, she figured a little extra muscle would help for those inevitable times when he wouldn't be able to rely on technology and intellect alone.

"It's a lot," she sighed. "I need to get a new car first, and replace most of my wardrobe..."

"Not to worry," he assured her with an amusingly charming waggle of his expressive eyebrows. "I ran a few quick calculations, and if you roughly estimate a five hour average per kidnapping, multiplied by three hundred and twenty-seven, then figure that as a basis against your current hourly wage—"

Roxanne set down her mug with a sharp _thunk!_ "Are you talking about paying me restitution?"

"Well, yes, I was thinking that it would only be fair..." The stern look with which she favored him took the smile from his face, replacing it with innocent, wide-eyed confusion. "You don't like the idea?" he asked uncertainly. "Everyone else seems to think that paying restitution is a good way for me to make up for some of my more villainous behavior..."

The reporter sighed again, but she also smiled. "For some people, it is," she agreed, leaning over to kiss his cheek, knowing it would help improve his visibly deflating spirits. It did, though not quite as much as she would've liked. _Should've gone for the lips._ "But they're asking so much of you, I couldn't think of adding to the burden. You don't need to buy my affection."

"But..." A small frown pinched between his brows. "Isn't that what I _should _be doing? I mean, not buying your affection, but isn't serial kidnapping a worse offense than property damage and vandalism and breaking and entering and disturbing the peace?"

She chuckled. "Well, yes, technically speaking, it is, but looking back on it, I think it might be more accurately described as a strange kind of alien/human courting ritual. I couldn't live with the idea of being paid restitution for _that."_

He deflated again. "But you _deserve_ it."

She patted his hand. "It's enough for me that you thought to offer. Besides, I know how much the court is suggesting as an appropriate amount. It's going to take you years to pay that off. Like, to the end of your life and after."

Now, the look of confusion took a left-hand, sort of "get real!" turn. "That?" Megamind snorted. "Oh, don't worry about _that. _It was all taken care of yesterday."

It was Roxanne's turn to look confused, though startled would have been a better description. Even shocked. "It was? What did you do, Megamind, empty out the vaults of every bank in the state of Michigan?"

He shook his head, lifting his chin in mild indignation. "Of course not! I would've needed to hit half the banks in Wisconsin and Ohio, too — but not Illinois," he added, wrinkling his nose. "They're always teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. No, the government finally unfroze all my assets — that's a terrible image, you know, freezing one's _assets. _ Who ever came up with such an... _obskeen _turn of phrase...?"

Roxanne whistled shrilly, interrupting his off-topic diatribe and bringing Pinky zipping back with the coffee pot. "Hold on one second!" she commanded, causing both alien and brainbot to freeze. She shooed off Pinky — who moved back to the other side of the kitchen with a disappointed little _narf_ — before turning to her host. "Are you telling me you were able to pay off that _ridiculously _huge settlement and not wind up totally bankrupt?"

The green eyes blinked in such a way that Roxanne was sure he was briefly questioning her sanity. "No, of course I didn't — wind up bankrupt, that is. Didn't I tell you that I've been accumulating receipts and royalties from a number of patented inventions, ever since I was seven?" She nodded. "And did I mention that I'd earned nearly as much as the Scott fortune by the time I turned sixteen?" She nodded again. "Well, do you think it all stopped back then? Just because I was in prison didn't mean that people could get away with using my inventions without proper payment. Everything went into trust against the possibility of my eventual parole, I've acquired quite a number of new patents since, and the income has increased substantially, except for a few unfortunate setbacks due to problems with the economy since the turn of the century. I'm not anywhere near bankrupt, far from it."

His expression shifted to the heart-wrenchingly sad puppy face no human could ever hope to match. "So is there something terribly wrong with wanting to share what I have with you, now that I can legally access it?"

The whole situation seemed so bizarre and unexpected, Roxanne felt as if her head had been popped off and not screwed back on quite right. She rubbed her forehead, trying to massage away the strange feeling. "So let me see if I've got this straight: You've paid off the restitution the city and the circuit court asked for two days ago."

"Yes, that's right," Megamind confirmed.

"And you still have money left."

"Also right."

"A _lot _of money."

"You could call it that."

"We're talking _a lot_ as in, won a couple of record-setting jackpots in the lottery."

"At least a couple, yes."

"Bill Gates kind of assets."

"He wishes! Gates wouldn't have a peet to pot in, if it weren't for some of my inventions!"

"Do I want to know how much, exactly?"

"Uh... from the way you're acting I'd say no, probably not."

"Which means the Area 51 'modern computer technology comes from aliens' conspiracy theories are actually right?"

"Well, since I _am _an alien, I suppose they are — although the technology came out of my head, not some bogus crashed spaceship."

"Fair enough." She ran one finger around the rim of her mug, contemplating the possibilities. Pinky sidled over to her again, so tentatively, Roxanne relented and let the bot top off her cup. "So, were you thinking of this as a loan or a gift or what?"

The ex-villain nibbled his lower lip, trying to decide which answer had the least risk of offending her. "Um... whatever you want, Roxanne, really," he finally said. "I do think I owe you more than I could ever repay, but if it would make you uncomfortable to accept anything like that from me, I'd understand. Some people might miscon— mikson— take it the wrong way, and I hear that independent women don't care for that sort of... er... bad image?"

Roxanne understood what he was trying to find the right words to say. "If you mean I don't like being beholden to other people for things I ought to be able to handle on my own, you're right, Megamind, I don't. Wayne tried to offer me money to help me out after I was released from the hospital, back... well, you know when. I didn't accept, of course. But he and I were just friends. Do you really want to do this for me, as a gift?"

"Of course! I can afford it, you can't, and..." He flushed sheepishly. "I feel more than a little responsible that you lost so much because of a scheme of mine that backfired. Rebuilding your apartment for you in whatever way you like would feel like paying you back, if only a little. I'd love to do it, if you'll let me."

She considered the matter a bit more. "Will you have the time, though? Between the meetings with the authorities and all the work you've been putting in to atone for your mistakes, I've seen more of you when I'm out reporting on the progress of restoring the city than I have here."

That truth brought a wistfully sad look to the blue face. "I know. But once the repairs are a little farther along and the reconstruction plans are finalized _and_ the police and other emergency services are hooked into the city wide security net, I'll have the time."

The sound Roxanne made was skeptically amused. "Then I can expect to still be living here come New Year's, huh?"

But the sarcasm flew right over Megamind's big head. "Oh, no, all that should be done by the middle of next week, tops. And if City Hall keeps dragging its feet deciding what they want done, they can drag them without me for a while. I really want to do this for you, Roxanne, all of it. New apartment, new car, new anything you need or want. It's just money, after all, and you're... you. Please let me help."

Those last four words, spoken with such simple, unaffected sincerity stole more than just the reporter's breath; what was left in her keeping of her own heart melted. In only a handful of days, Megamind had dropped so much of the "evil" facade that had been his armor against a very cruel world for nearly thirty years, Roxanne could understand why some people feared it was just another act, another trick. But even though he would probably never lose some of those mannerisms and habits — she frankly hoped he didn't, because they were part of what made him what he was, in amusingly and charmingly quirky ways — the fact that he was able to just let go of so much of them now that he had a good reason to do so was almost literally mind-blowing. She had to find a way to let the people of Metro City see what was now so plain in the former villain, the side of him that was so heartbreakingly earnest, one could not help but see in his face and hear in his voice the child he had once been and in many ways still was, exposed, vulnerable, and asking for the chance in life he had never been given, had never been allowed: _Please let me help._

Yes, she was definitely going to have to find Wayne and rip him a couple of new ones. Very soon.

She smiled, surrendering. "Okay, why not? If a girl can't let her guy show off his generous, indulgent side for her once in a while, she's not much of a girlfriend, is she?"

Seeing the look that transformed his expression from uncertain sadness to absolute joy was like watching the first sunrise over paradise. "Yes!" he crowed, unable to contain himself for more than two seconds, pumping both fists in victory. "Yes, yes, yes, yes, _yes! _Oh, thank you thank you thank you, Roxanne, I was hoping you'd agree, not that I thought for a second that you wouldn't, but you know, well, I did have that little doubt about it being insulting to a strong person like you, but I thought well, it couldn't hurt to ask, though I guess it _could, _I mean, literally hurt, if you _did _get insulted and decided to clobber me, but still, I thought, this is Roxanne, she can be a reasonable person, after all, she put up with all those kidnappings and the evil surprises on her birthday and—"

The blue eyes widened. "Whoa, time out! _You _were the one who sent me all those silly singing telegrams with the most godawful excuse for lyrics known to Man? And here I was thinking it must've been Wayne in an early 'Music Man' phase..."

Megamind drooped so suddenly, she felt as if she'd just popped his inner balloon. "You thought they were that bad?" he squeaked, uncomfortable with her comparison to the very musically challenged Music Man.

She gave him her best reassuring smile, and was relieved that she didn't need to fake it. "The lyrics were pretty dreadful, but I have to admit, the tunes _were _evil, 'cause they got stuck in my head for days! That's a _good_ thing, sweetie," she added when he still looked doubtful. "That means they were catchy and I liked them."

"You did?" He immediately reinflated, puncture wound patched. "Really? I can show you some other things like that if you want, without the lyrics, of course..."

She laughed at his irrepressible enthusiasm. "Later. Let's deal with one surprise at a time. Like remodeling my apartment. I've gotta tell you, that idea _really _appeals to me, especially after seeing what you've done here, with nothing to work with."

"Actually, having nothing as a starting point can be an asset. Loft space is _so _much easier to work with, since you don't have a lot of extant structure and utilities that need to be incorporated." He suddenly stood up, grabbed his coffee mug in one hand and her free hand with the other. "Minion wanted to put in another load of laundry before he takes you to work," he explained as he tugged gently to encourage her to follow him. "I want to show you some of the ideas I came up with for the remodeling, it won't take more than a minute or two..."

Roxanne had heard enough of that claim in the last few days to know that if she went along with him, she'd be late for work — again. _Ah, what the heck, _she thought, snagging her own mug as she allowed herself to be led toward the elevator to the Lair's business levels. After everything she'd been through lately, her boss would understand and cut her a little slack, especially if she could provide a few exclusive comments from the city's new defender to spice up the evening's newscast. Besides, after seeing the Lair's living quarters, she was undeniably curious to get a look at what kind of ideas Megamind had come up with to "remodel" her place. And frankly, when he got all fired up over something in this energetic boyish way of his, he was irresistible.

"I hope you're not thinking Baroque or Louis the Fourteenth," she warned with an eloquent shudder.

"Oh, no," she was instantly assured as they entered the lift, Pinky discreetly trailing behind, coffee pot still in claw. "I was thinking more along the lines of late neo-classical, with the Egyptian and Etruscan geometric influences rather than all the silly frills and furbelows of the early Regency. And I had some other intriguing ideas in Italian villa style, Tuscany or the Amalfi coast—"

"Sir!" Minion's scolding voice came echoing up from somewhere below. "You _really_ need to empty your pockets more often...!"

Roxanne grinned at the sudden purple-cheeked "Uh-oh, busted!" expression that twitched across Megamind's face. Well, she reflected with amusement, even if she _was _stuck here until the end of the year, the unexpected twists and turns of life around the no-longer-evil Lair were certainly _never _boring.

_Finis_

_

* * *

_Author's Afterword: My humble thanks to all the readers and reviewers who have come along for this strange little ride. Who knows what new twists and turns await us in the next story? :D_  
_


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